Sapiens - How does a curable disease become incurable?

In 2020, 1.5 million people died of tuberculosis, making it the second-deadliest infectious disease after COVID-19. The World Health Organization calls this bacterial infection “curable and preventable.” Yet strains of TB that are resistant to antibiotics have been found in every country surveyed by the WHO.

Bharat Venkat, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, Institute for Society and Genetics, has been studying tuberculosis in India for more than a decade. In his new book, At the Limits of Cure, he explores what it means when a cure comes undone and discusses the urgency of context-focused approaches to TB treatment and prevention.