Richard Skolnik, teaching Yale's Essentials of Global Health course, dedicates this session to tuberculosis as a global health burden. He covers the biology of the disease, how it spreads, and the scale of illness and death it causes worldwide, with attention to which populations bear the heaviest burden, including people living with HIV and those in low-income countries. The lecture walks through risk factors and determinants before turning to what public health interventions actually work, focusing on cost-effective approaches to diagnosis and treatment such as directly observed therapy. Skolnik frames tuberculosis within the course's broader method of examining a condition's nature, its burden, who is affected, and what has been shown to reduce that burden. Part of a lecture series that also covers HIV, malaria, and neglected tropical diseases within the same analytical structure.