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#CheerfulCharts #12: Global tuberculosis death rates

23 Oct 2024 | Science Notes

Tuberculosis, or consumption, is a bacterial infection that used to be a big killer around the world. According to Wikipedia, in the early 1800s it was responsible for a quarter of all deaths in Europe. And data from Statistics Canada’s historical archive shows the death rate from tuberculosis in this country was over 80 per 100,000 in the 1920s. Today it is less than 1 per hundred thousand here, except among the elderly for whom it is still only about 1.6 per hundred thousand. Under age 50 it is less than 0.1 per hundred thousand, so basically zero. In the rest of the world death rates are much higher still, but as we show in this week’s Cheerful Chart, they are coming down quickly. Here are the numbers, courtesy of Our World In Data:

It is about 9 per 100,000 in the 15-49 age range, 29.3 in the 50-69 age range, 68.4 in the 70+ age range. And mercifully it's only 1.1 in the 5-14 age range. For each age range the death rate has fallen by two-thirds or more since 1980. For this we can thank effective vaccines and antibiotics.

Thus fossil fuels can’t take the credit… except in that they made it possible to manufacture and deliver these life-saving medicines that have helped so many countries around the world hasten the end of this lethal monster. And created the economy in which advanced high-quality medicine can be invented, produced and distributed, and acute illness treated in excellent hospitals. Oh, and improved both food and shelter, dramatically assisting the body’s own defences. Other than that, they played no real role.

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