I was shocked by the stories my mum used to tell me about battling tuberculosis in the 1950s.
She was 21 when she fell ill and spent months in a sanatorium where treatment consisted mainly of bed rest and fresh air.
Her ward had patio doors which were left open all year round and she would lie there, shivering, waiting for her next stone hot water bottle to be delivered by the orderly.
She even recalled waking up one December morning to find there was four inches of snow covering the tarpaulin on her bed and a robin perched on her toes.
It sounded cruel and archaic, especially as I’d had the childhood BCG vaccine and thought TB had been eradicated.
But the truth is that the 9,000-year-old disease has never been conquered and it still kills one person in the world every 20 seconds.
The BCG jab only gives immunity until teenage years. There’s no adult vaccine and resistant strains are on the rise.
In 2021, TB claimed 1.6 million lives worldwide – more than 2022’s 1.2 million Covid deaths.
And yet the resources devoted to tackling the ticking tuberculosis timebomb are a fraction of those directed towards Covid
So says Prof Robert Wilkinson, the British expert who is leading a global drive for a one-shot TB cure.
He is collaborating with research institutes in the US, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Madagascar and the Ivory Coast to find a drug that treats the disease and stops it coming back.
But he says we also need a proper UK strategy to screen and treat arrivals from high-risk areas who may have the resistant strains.
Latest data shows a TB rate of 7.9 cases per 100,000 in England in 2021, compared with 4.7 in Germany and 2.4 in the United States.
“It’s inevitable TB will be the most deadly infectious disease in the world again,” Prof Wilkinson told the Daily Mirror’s health editor.
“Most people, if you told them TB deaths were of a similar order of magnitude as Covid, would not believe you. There are not enough resources compared to Covid.
“It’s a drop in the ocean.”
The Government should heed his warnings. We must act now to prevent this ancient enemy from threatening all of our futures.
