Bindman found that people in low income communities generally had higher rates of hospitalization. But some poorer neighborhoods had much higher rates than others. And that may be because some low income communities provide public clinics, for example, that may improve the access to care in those communities, and that can make a real difference in the likelihood of needing to be hospitalized. For Science Today, I'm Steve Tokar. This is Science Today.
Tuberculosis is a major killer in developing countries around the world.
But epidemiologist Sally Blower of the University of California, San Francisco says the story is different in Europe and North America. The mortality from TB has been declining dramatically for about a hundred years, and there wasn't effective treatment, drugs against TB until about the 1940s and 1950s. So a lot of this decline was long before there were widespread drugs. Some of the decline is due to improved sanitation and standards of living. But according to a mathematical model created by Blower and her fellow researchers, there's another reason that's out of human control.