Curated playlist
Tropical diseases
- CholeraCholera can kill an untreated person within hours. A healthy adult can lose ten to twenty litres of fluid in a day.
- MalariaMalaria has reshaped human blood more than any other disease in recent history.
- Dengue feverSurviving dengue once can make a second infection far more dangerous. Antibodies can help the virus in.
- EbolaEbola kills, on average, half of the people it infects. In the worst recorded outbreak, 90 percent died.
- Marburg virusIn 1967, laboratory workers at the Behringwerke, a major industrial plant in the German city of Marburg, handled tissues from grivet monkeys. These animals are also called African green monkeys. That same year, a mysterious illness…
- Chagas diseaseChagas disease travels on the back of an insect with an affectionate-sounding nickname, the kissing bug. These triatomine bugs feed at night, and they prefer the moist skin near the eyes or mouth of a sleeping person. The parasite they…
- SchistosomiasisSchistosomiasis, also called snail fever, infected an estimated 236.6 million people in 2019. People catch it through contact with fresh water that looks like any other stream, pond, or irrigation channel. Somewhere in that water, a…
- LeprosyIn the 1980s, 5.2 million people around the world were living with leprosy. By 2020, that figure had fallen below 200,000. Leprosy, also called Hansen's disease, is a long-term infection caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae, or by…
- RabiesRabies kills about 59,000 people around the world every year. About 40% of them are children under the age of 15. Once symptoms appear, the result is virtually always death, even with intensive care. The disease passes from animals to…
- LeptospirosisLeptospirosis, a blood infection that can kill, traces the first name of its bacterium to a punctuation mark. In 1907, Arthur Stimson examined a slice of kidney tissue taken at a post mortem. Under his microscope he saw a thin organism…