Tuberculosis – the world’s deadliest infectious disease – could be dormant in your system for years before you realize you have it. In the U.S., it’s relatively rare; provisional data shows that there were just over 10,000 cases in 2024. But in other parts of the world, especially lower-income countries, the disease is spreading much more actively. Worldwide, more than 10 million people are diagnosed with an active tuberculosis infection every year. And even though modern medicine has all the tools to cure it, over a million people around the world still die from the sickness annually.Author John Green thinks that’s a problem. In his book Everything is Tuberculosis, he charts the spread of tuberculosis in the past to the lessons it has to teach us in the present.Interested in more science and medical history? Email us your question at [email protected] to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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Watch or listen on the NPR app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, short wavers, Emily Kwong here. Today, we're going to focus on an emerging field that could help the natural world, but is also a little controversial.
Yes, controversial because it gets at an almost like philosophical question, Emily, about what our role should be in the natural world.
Science correspondent Nate Rott, ever the philosopher.
And I'm a pretty poor excuse for a philosopher. But, you know, I think the easiest way to explain this technology that we're going to be talking about is to start with an effort that's going on to save something we all know and love. Frogs.
Frogs are little wet things that run around in the mud. They should be absolutely just covered in infections at all times. And the reason they're not is they produce antibiotics.
This is Anthony Waddell, a researcher at Macquarie University in Australia. It's just chytrid is too good. Chytrid fungus, which is like this horrendous and deadly skin disease affecting amphibians that, you know, the antibiotics they have often can't fix. And this disease is now found on every continent except Antarctica.
It's considered the worst pandemic ever, worst invasive species ever in terms of biodiversity loss.
Anthony has been focused on protecting frog populations from chytrid pretty much his entire scientific career. And he started with the type of desert frog that lived near his hometown, Las Vegas.
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