TB is back with a vengeance

If you were a teenager before 2005, one reminder of tuberculosis in British life is that small circular scar on your bicep. Maybe you’ve explained to your children why it’s there, if you ever knew. The BCG is no longer a routine vaccination in the UK, a revision which signalled to many that TB was over. What used to be known as consumption became treatable, preventable and ostensibly consigned to medical history as a threat of the past.

We tell stories about diseases as if they are constant things. ‘It’s no worse than flu’ has become a familiar phrase; but flu is not all that common, it varies wildly in severity and changes strain every year. Pathogens evolve and mutate, avoiding the risk of staying the same for too long. Despite public familiarity with Covid variants, the idea that the virus is acquiring several new identities – perhaps more infectious or lethal than what’s come before – is unnerving.