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Showing posts from April, 2021

Tuberculosis in the MCU

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Spoilers for  The Falcon and the Winter Soldier  episode 3! This probably won't make sense anyway if you haven't watched the show, so you've been warned... So, I've been back in the Marvel fandom for nearly 12 weeks, since the first episode of WandaVision. Meanwhile, I never stopped doing global health advocacy. While Monica and Sam become my favorite characters more and more every day, the tuberculosis epidemic is becoming more and more urgent. What can the two tuberculosis references in MCU canon teach us about the real-life epidemic? Image description: my attempts at doodling the COVID-19 virus and tuberculosis bacteria Tuberculosis (TB) is an airborne, infectious disease caused by bacteria that usually attack the lungs. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was the number one infectious disease killer in the world, taking 1.4 million lives in 2019 and sickening 10 million . And it took a long time for COVID-19 to surpass TB- not until November 2020! TB is still bigge