The number on the brochure

Show notes

A one-page vendor brochure at a conference booth puts ninety-nine percent accuracy in the largest type on the page, and Vinay talks through why that number, on its own, says almost nothing about whether a tuberculosis screener is safe to use. Using the CDC's provisional 2025 US figures, the WHO's 2025 global report, and a textbook screening example, he works out how the same tool can be right about one flag in ten in one place and one in three hundred in another. He ends with what he thinks the honest version of a vendor brochure would say instead.