For those living in high income countries like the U.S., it can be easy to forget about tuberculosis. But it's an airborne disease that spreads easily, and with each new infection, the bacteria that causes TB gets a chance to replicate itself—and evolve. Allowing the disease to spread unchecked increases the likelihood that more contagious or drug resistant variants of TB will develop. Last week, the United Nations held its second ever high-level meeting to tackle the issue. 

Back in July, I spoke to Dr. David Bishai, the director of the school of public health at the University of Hong Kong. He told me that people in affluent countries need to start taking tuberculosis more seriously. “There’s no biological reason that multi-drug-resistant TB can't acquire what it takes to transmit easily… We know that ancestral TB was extremely contagious through airborne methods. And so this does represent a pandemic threat.”

Here are some important TB facts: 

• TB is the world’s deadliest infectious disease. It infects approximately 10 million people and kills 1.5 million each year. 
• Left untreated, TB kills half of all people who develop it within five years. 
• As the TB bacteria evolves, it becomes immune to existing therapies, requiring stronger and more toxic drugs to treat it. Today, 3.6% of all new TB cases are resistant to multiple drugs. 

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