Tuberculosis treatment

How it saves lives

Tuberculosis is caused by a slow-growing bacterium that usually settles in the lungs and can sit quietly for years before it turns deadly. The cure is not one drug but a combination of antibiotics taken for months, long enough to kill the bacteria at every stage of their sluggish life cycle. Catching a case early and seeing the treatment through also stops that person from passing the infection to anyone else.

The story

For most of human history tuberculosis, the wasting cough once called consumption, was simply part of the background of death. Robert Koch found the bacterium responsible in 1882, but knowing the cause did not cure anyone. That took until 1943, when Albert Schatz, working in Selman Waksman's lab, pulled the antibiotic streptomycin out of a soil microbe and gave doctors their first drug that actually worked. Combination therapy followed, and over the past quarter century the patient work of finding cases and treating them has saved tens of millions of lives. It is not finished. TB still kills over 1.2 million people a year, drug-resistant strains are harder and costlier to treat, and progress now leans on funding that has stalled.