Ola Rosling & Hans Rosling show simple rules of thumb for dismantling global misconceptions and beating chimpanzees. Even the most worldly and well-traveled among us have had their perspectives shifted by Hans Rosling. She has joined him as a speaker at several high-level events. But with streams running dry and families starving, women who prepared cassava had skipped this step — to their detriment. How could anyone hope to solve problems if they didn’t understand the different challenges faced, for example, by Congolese subsistence farmers far from paved roads and Brazilian street vendors in urban Hans Rosling asks questions that challenge people’s preconceived ideas.Ola, his son, offered to help explain the world with graphics, and built his father software that animated data compiled by the UN and the World Bank. “Campuses are full of siloed people who do advocacy about things they don’t understand,” he says.So now, in the sunset of his career, Rosling is writing a book with his son Ola and his daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund to dispel outdated beliefs.

Every now and again, he stirs the pot. As a young boy in Uppsala, he listened intently as his father, a coffee-factory employee, described the hardships of the East African labourers who picked the beans. He continues to work and plugs away at his “factfulness book on megamisconceptions”. Most followed her lead. “It’s a stroke of genius,” Pinker says. Through an interpreter, he explained that he believed he knew the cause, and he wanted to test local people’s blood to be sure. The plant turned out to contain cyanogenic glucoside, a precursor to cyanide. Rosling became a lecturer on health care in low-income countries at Uppsala University but spent time in Tanzania and the Congo region as well, studying the paralysing disease he had first observed in Mozambique. A professor of global health at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, his work focused on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (as he pointed out) is no longer worlds away from the West. “Then, two men walk in with guns, and in comes Fidel Castro,” he recalls. He travelled to Japan to receive the newest treatment, not yet approved in Sweden. This is the name that Rosling would use in 1990, when he and his colleagues formally defined the disease and laid out the evidence for what causes it (As Rosling travelled, he trained African graduate students who specialized in konzo, and together they found that proper cassava processing was the most realistic method of short-term prevention. To help get there, he celebrates improvements. However, the message often fell on deaf ears because of hunger and conflict.

Visual aids in hand, the elder Rosling began to script the provocative presentations that have made him famous. Like many people, we first became aware of Hans when he gave a mind-blowing TED talk in 2006. “I’ve watched people have this ‘aha’ moment when Hans speaks,” she says. Hans Rosling’s predictions started to be highly valued when Gapminder Foundation, which he founded, developed an incredibly interesting piece of software. “Why are we talking about China as the developing world? Open source and touch screen support. “I realized my skills were needed,” he says.As soon as the drugs cured him, Rosling flew to West Africa to join the Liberian government’s epidemiological-surveillance team. He calls the UN’s push to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030 an entirely reasonable goal because the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has declined by more than half in the past quarter of a century, and the strategies needed to help the remainder are known.His attitude aligns him with Steven Pinker of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who wrote Both have been criticized as being Pollyannaish about the global situation in the face of tragedies such as the conflict in Syria. She is thrilled when Rosling smoothly uses data to show how the reverse is true: as rates of child survival have increased over time, family size has shrunk. They thought it was all large family sizes and low life expectancies: only the poorest and most conflict-ridden countries served as their reference point. The government was rationing meat, and adults had sacrificed their portion to nourish children, pregnant women and the elderly.Reporting back to Castro, Rosling couched his conclusions carefully: “I know your neighbours want to force their economic system on you, which I don’t like, but the system needs to change because this planned economy has brought this disease to people.” After his presentation, Rosling went to the toilet.

Three minutes with Hans Rosling will change your mind about the world He has influenced leaders from Melinda Gates to Fidel Castro. Rosling can recognize it in other ways. The private sector needs to understand the economic and political conditions of current and potential markets. He warned that financial experts ignored these rising powers at their peril.

He relays facts that he thinks many academics have been too slow to appreciate and argues that researchers are ignorant about the state of health and wealth around the world. “I used to tease my colleagues who thought in a traditional framework,” O’Neill says. His accolades do not include conventional academic milestones, such as massive grants or a stream of publications in top-tier journals.

“It is where Ebola starts. It’s where Boko Haram hides girls.

With the right facts, he hopes, people will make the right decisions — he just needs to face down the misconceptions.Who is better suited to the task than a man able to stave off machetes with the power of a few pictures and his words?Our award-winning show features highlights from the week's edition of Now, he is on … He noticed that no matter what country he was in, the towns afflicted looked similarly tragic. Dietary amino acids can also detoxify the poison, but people had no access to meat or beans that provide them.At the end of 1981, owing to a number of circumstances including the death of their third child, Rosling and his family returned to Sweden. The Cuban embassy in Sweden had asked him to find out whether toxic cassava could have caused roughly 40,000 people to experience visual blurring and severe numbness in their legs.