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Tuberculosis, which we’ll also call TB, is spread from person to person when someone who is ill with TB coughs and the bacteria are scattered in aerosols that float in the air. If someone’s sitting nearby and breathes in the same air, they themselves may become infected with TB. About 10 million people every year develop active tuberculosis worldwide, while over 2 billion people are believed to have latent TB infection. Poverty is the principal driver of TB cases worldwide, and that’s more common in low and middle income countries than in high-income countries. In some crowded and impoverished communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, for example, as many as one in a hundred people per year get TB, while in developed countries in North America and Western Europe, TB incidence is a thousand fold less common.
