Today Is March 24

World Tuberculosis Day is commemorated annually on March 24 to raise public awareness about the devastating health, social and economic consequences of TB, and to step up efforts to end the global TB epidemic.

A close up of a culture of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Wikipedia

The lung disease tuberculosis was the scourge of the 18th and 19th centuries in the West wiping out thousands every year. By the middle of the 19th century it was responsible for one in seven of all European deaths. The cause was unknown until on March 24, 1882 German doctor Robert Koch discovered the bacterium causing it.

Eight years later Koch prematurely announced he had developed tuberculin, a cure for tuberculosis. Though it proved ineffective as a vaccine against the disease it did work as a way of finding out whether a patient had experienced tuberculosis.

The Bacillus Calmette–Guerin vaccine against tuberculous is based on a bovine strain of the bacterium. It was developed by Albert Calmette and Camille Guerin in the 1910s and first used on humans in 1921. Today, in countries where tuberculosis is common, one dose of BCG is recommended in healthy babies as close to the time of birth as possible.

The organism that usually causes tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, can travel through the air and spread from one person to the next. This happens when infected people cough, speak, sneeze, or spit.

In 2012, 8.6 million people fell ill with TB, and 1.3 million died from the disease, mostly in low and middle-income countries.