It is eighty years since the first effective drugs to treat tuberculosis (TB) and seventy years since the combination cure was first applied in Edinburgh. But TB still kills 1.3 million people every year across the world .
Chris Holme looks back at what went right and what went wrong and how the contributions made by women have often been marginalised or ignored...
.. Sigrid and Patricia were two ordinary young women living an ocean apart who changed medicine for ever.
This was 1944, at the height of the Second World War. Both women had advanced pulmonary tuberculosis (TB) and were close to death. They volunteered to be human guinea pigs for two experimental drugs.
TB, or consumption, had plagued humankind for millennia and had probably claimed more lives than any other disease. Robert Koch identified the bacterium in 1882, which prompted decades of scientific effort across every continent to find a cure. None came.
Then two new drugs arrived within the space of one month. In Gothenburg, Sigrid, aged twenty-four, was diagnosed with TB after the birth of her first child Her last chance was the new drug PAS (para-amino salicylic acid). She was first given the drug orally on October 30, 1944.
At the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, Patricia, aged twenty-two, a farmer’s daughter from Austin, Texas, was in a similarly desperate condition. She had her first injection of streptomycin on November 20. No-one knew the correct dosages.
Recovery was slow and laborious, but both women were cure.
