In August, I was diagnosed with tuberculosis, an infection that is responsible for more deaths around the world than any other. There was a catch though--it is a latent infection, meaning that it is not spreading nor is it contagious. But if it becomes active, it could be transmitted to my children, my husband and even someone sitting next to me on a plane.
Tuberculosis, or TB, is a disease that should be long gone; the bacteria has been found in Egyptian mummies. And yet, TB kills more people today than any other infectious disease in the world: 1.8 million people in 2015, according to an announcement last week by the World Health Organization.
Even though there's only a 1 in 10 chance that my latent infection will become active TB, I am now following a three-month drug regimen that is so harsh, it could destroy my liver--because I can't take the chance that I could become infectious and spread this deadly disease.
I have a lot of company. Public health experts estimate that 1 out every 3 people in the world--about 2.5 billion--has a latent TB infection.
And here is the irony of the situation: I was dedicated to ending TB before I even knew about my infection, working for a non-profit organization seeking to develop new TB vaccines.
I will never know when or where I was infected; TB is airborne and can travel as fast and as far as an airplane. It may have been during one of my business trips to parts of the world where TB is common or I may have picked it up in the New York City subway.
And without a new vaccine, we are all at risk. That's because the only current vaccine, Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG), hasn't ended the TB epidemic even though it's been in use since 1921 and is the most widely used vaccine in the world. Although BCG protects many infants and young children from severe forms of TB, it doesn't do much to protect teens and adults, who are most likely to develop and spread TB.
While treatment for TB is usually effective, at least for strains that still respond to most antibiotics it is not a walk in the park. Remember the risk to my liver? That's just part of it. The medications can cause nausea, joint pain, hearing loss and more. And there's always the risk that the bacteria could become resistant to the medications used to fight them - which is why R&D for new TB vaccines is so important - vaccines should work just as well on all strains of TB, even those that are drug resistant.
The tragedy is that while someone dies from TB every 18 seconds, we simply should not be at this point. TB has not inspired massive research initiatives like there has been for Ebola and Zika. In fact, the World Health Organization estimates an annual $1.3 billion funding gap in TB research.
In the U.S., federal funding for research and development for neglected diseases like TB has stagnated since the great recession of 2009. If you set aside the surge of money allocated to Ebola research, funding for these diseases has dropped nearly 13 percent since 2009.
My experience with TB will hopefully be brief, and my family will probably remain safe thanks to the access I have to quality healthcare. It might be different if I lived in a country with fewer healthcare resources and where exposure to TB is so much more frequent.
Yet even still, an airborne disease can go anywhere. We need to address TB for the immediate threat that it is, and incentivize innovation to stop the disease from spreading any further.
Dara Erck is vice president for external affairs at Aeras.