Catching Breath: The Making and Unmaking of Tuberculosis

British medical researcher Lougheed creditably covers the long, painful history of tuberculosis, the world’s leading infectious killer, and the impressive recent advances in combatting it. The slow-growing and tough TB bacterium has infected humans since prehistory, but our immune system largely kept it under control up until the industrial revolution, when humans packed into cities and their health and immune systems declined. Improvements in public health after 1900 reduced infections, and it was widely believed that anti-TB antibiotics—which were developed after just after WWII—would eliminate the threat. But resistance appeared; widespread poverty in the developing world, combined with other diseases attacking the immune system such as HIV, has produced a worldwide epidemiological crisis. Lougheed delivers an expert account of this history, although her efforts to enliven a dismal subject with cheerful anecdotes and jokes do not always succeed. She is at her best when describing the research done in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Dazzling technical advances, new drugs, the development of genomics, insights into the bacterium’s metabolism, and massive but halting political efforts may eventually turn the tide, but as Lougheed writes, TB is “very much a disease of the present and, sadly, the future.” (Sept.)