Human catastrophe

Public Health | Far from going the way of the sanitarium and the tenement house, tuberculosis has found a drug-resistant new life of its own | Lynde Langdon

Kathleen Moser has a speech ready for when people ask her what she does for a living. "When I tell people that I work with TB, over and over again, they say, 'Well, is that still around? What could you possibly do all day?'"

Moser, director of San Diego County's Tuberculosis Control Program, explains to surprised acquaintances again and again that TB is an airborne infectious disease that takes six months to two years of supervised therapy to cure. She tells them how she works to prevent and treat TB in San Diego County along with a staff of 60 people—eight of whom watch people take TB medicine all day long.

Once the world's leading cause of death, tuberculosis, or TB, still infects one in three people around the world.