The main "killer" of people is not HIV, rabies virus or malaria, and various strains of the hepatitis virus, which kill more than 1.3 million people every year, says an article published in the journal Lancet.

"Similar conclusions cause us anger, but we were not at all surprised that hepatitis kills more people than HIV, malaria and tuberculosis. Such a sad course of events is connected with the fact that the fight against hepatitis has never been part of the political priorities of all the leading countries of the world and the fact that there are no global systems for financing such projects, "commented Charles Gore, president The World Alliance Against Hepatitis.

Every year, WHO and other UN health services publish in the Lancet magazine reports on which diseases and what health problems are bothering humanity today, and how many years of life they take. Such reports serve as a kind of guidance for action for UN political bodies and health services of individual countries.

This year, the authors of the report focused not on diseases caused by problems in the work of the human body or poor living conditions, but on various viral, bacterial and parasitic infections. To compile a picture of their evolution over the past 40 years, scientists collected and analyzed medical archives from 147 countries around the world, where they monitored the causes of death of their citizens.

They account for an average of approximately 19.4% of deaths that occurred during this time period, and their total number is gradually increasing, which scientists attribute to deteriorating health standards and a sharp increase in the population in developing countries.

The leading role in this respect, to some surprise of the authors of the report, was taken by viral hepatitis - in recent years it killed about 1.34 million people. The cause of their death was not only the disease itself, but also its associated negative effects - cirrhosis and liver cancer, as well as other complications. The second place was taken by tuberculosis with 1.2 million deaths, the third - HIV, which killed about a million people, and the fourth - malaria and 719 thousand of its victims.