1995
I know all about TB, or “consumption” as they called it in Gran’s day. Hippocrates’s “Captain of the Three Men of Death”, it was one constituent in Richard’s cocktail of killers.
Inhaled from the coughing or sneezing of an infected person, the bacillus lodges itself in the alveoli of the lungs, encasing itself within a waxy cell wall as the immune system and white blood cells rally to fight it, so that equal numbers of bacteria survive as are killed. This, the latent phase of the disease, can go on for years, even decades. An internal war rages but the body is unaware, feels nothing.
Then, for some reason – pregnancy, HIV, hunger, stress, age or, sometimes, nothing obvious — the balance tips and the bacteria begin to win, slowly but steadily replicating until each white blood cell
