Eight years after surgeons removed a parasitic cyst from her liver, a 28-year-old woman arrived at a tuberculosis clinic in Chengdu with seven months of worsening back pain and two months of coughing. Scans showed her T12 to L2 vertebrae being eaten away, abscesses pooling alongside her spine and in her right psoas muscle, and small nodules scattered through both lungs.
Everything pointed to tuberculosis. She had finished treatment for pulmonary TB three years earlier. A family member in her household had active TB. She lived in a region where the disease is common. Her doctors started standard anti-TB therapy. Over the next 12 months, she got worse, and the reason is a case study in how a correct-looking diagnosis can hold for a year while the actual infection keeps spreading.
