The curable disease that kills someone every 20 seconds: Tuberculosis (ft. John Green)

05/01/24 • 33 min

Every year, tuberculosis claims over a million lives despite being curable. Tuberculosis or TB is an infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. About 5–10% of people infected with TB will eventually get symptoms. In the early stages a TB infection might cause chest pain, a cough, night sweats, and loss of appetite. But eventually it could create holes in the lungs and cause you to cough up blood. And of course, TB can be deadly.
In this episode of Tiny Matters, Sam and Deboki talk with TB researcher Uzma Khan as well as John Green, the author of books including The Anthropocene Reviewed, Paper Towns, The Fault in Our Stars, and Turtles All the Way Down. John is also the co-creator of Crash Course and one half of the vlogbrothers — the other half being his brother Hank Green, who Deboki and Sam chatted with on the show last year.
Although he's best known as an author and YouTuber, last summer John made headlines for something else: fighting for more equitable access to tuberculosis treatments, particularly bedaquiline, an incredibly effective and essential medicine for patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis.
In this episode, Sam and Deboki cover the science and history of this devastating yet treatable disease, the recent public pressure on companies that is leading to increased treatment and testing access, and clinical trials that make John and Uzma hopeful that one day this humanity-plaguing disease could be gone.
If you’d like to learn more, go to tbfighters.org. You can also subscribe to John’s newsletter: tbfighters.org/newsletter.
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In this episode of Tiny Matters, Sam and Deboki cover the fascinating textile landscape, from plant-based fibers to the evolution of modern synthetic materials and the investigative approaches used to preserve not just these fabrics but also the stories they tell and the cultural significance they hold.
We have a YouTube channel! Full-length audio episodes can be found here. And to see video of Sam, Deboki, and episode guests, check out Tiny Matters YouTube shorts here!
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Tiny Matters - The curable disease that kills someone every 20 seconds: Tuberculosis (ft. John Green)

Transcript

Speaker 100:00:02.185

So I recently met with the head of drug development at a major pharmaceutical company and I said you know , tuberculosis is the deadliest infectious disease in the world . And he said is it ? And I said yeah , and he said I thought it was malaria , and malaria is a very dangerous disease . Malaria kills about 600,000 people per year , but tuberculosis kills over one and a half mi