The history of tuberculosis from earliest times to the development of drugs

How wrong can one be? In the late 1980s, we thought that tuberculosis (TB) was an infection that had been controlled and almost eradicated from the developed world. However, emergence and re-emergence of infectious diseases plague the developed and the developing world today, and the medical profession struggles to cope [2]. In 2010, there were 8.8 million incident cases of TB, although the absolute number is said to have been declining since 2006 [3]. However, TB has the potential to ‘develop frequency rates with the status of the “big killer” again’ as we live through the twenty-first century [4].