IInfectious diseases are no longer the major killers in the U.S. that they once were, but they still surprise us.
According to a report published Tuesday in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, deaths from infectious disease accounted for 5.4 percent of deaths from 1980 to 2014.
That’s a big change from 1900, when infectious diseases like pneumonia, tuberculosis and diarrhea accounted for almost half of all deaths. The historical decline represents great progress in sanitation, antibiotic discovery and vaccination programs, says Heidi Brown, an assistant professor of public health at the University of Arizona and an author of the research letter. “We’ve done phenomenal and amazing things with respect to infectious diseases,” she says.
