Abstract
Tuberculosis is a disease like no other. It has claimed more lives down the ages than perhaps any other infectious illness and has resisted man’s efforts to isolate and conquer it. A disease once thought to be on the verge of extinction has rebounded in its most dangerous avatar yet. This chapter describes the culmination of the hunt for the elusive microbe of tuberculosis and the fascinating sequence of events that followed.
That which is not expressed will be forgotten.
And what is forgotten will happen again.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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Abbreviations
- BCG:
-
Bacillus Calmette-Guerin
- DOTS:
-
Directly observed treatment
- INH:
-
Isonicotinylhydrazide
- MDR-TB:
-
Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis
- MTB:
-
Mycobacterium tuberculosis
- PAS:
-
Para-aminosalicylic acid
- PPD:
-
Purified protein derivative
- SCCT:
-
Short-course chemotherapy
- TB:
-
Tuberculosis
- WHO:
-
World Health Organization
- XDR-TB:
-
Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis
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Hasan, A. (2019). History of TB: Robert Koch and Beyond. In: Hasnain, S., Ehtesham, N., Grover, S. (eds) Mycobacterium Tuberculosis: Molecular Infection Biology, Pathogenesis, Diagnostics and New Interventions. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9413-4_1
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