You might have seen this meme on social media. It's a bad meme making a deceptive point. Why?

1/

Because the annual number of TB cases in the US is actually less than 10,000 and has been declining for decades. The number of deaths is ~500. And that is a high mortality rate, which is why we vaccinate for TB.

2/

https://www.cdc.gov/tb/publications/factsheets/statistics/tbtrends.htm

I can guarantee you that if 10 million Americans contracted TB a year, killing more than a tenth of them, we absolutely would be adopting serious, society-changing measures to address it.

How do I know that? Because that's what we did a century ago!

fin/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/plague-gallery/