How common is tuberculosis?
According to the World Health Organization, more than 8.8 million people worldwide are infected with tuberculosis, and almost 1.6 million people per year die from tuberculosis. There are about 14,000 cases of tuberculosis every year in the U.S., according to Carol Dukes Hamilton, MD, an infectious disease specialist at Duke University Medical Center and the medical director of North Carolina’s tuberculosis control program. “TB continues to be a really major problem in the world. It’s huge,” Hamilton says. “The most common thing people say is, ‘TB? I thought it was gone.’ It’s really not gone. And it can surge. It can come back. We don’t want to be alarmist, but we have to continue to pay attention.
