Tuberculosis: the dis-ease that didn’t dis-appear

Bastian, Ivan; L Krause, Vicki

doi:10.5694/j.1326-5377.2008.tb01552.x

Topics

Australia, like other high-income countries with a low TB incidence, faces special challenges in controlling TB

Books with optimistic titles such as Triumph over tuberculosis, The retreat of tuberculosis and The miracle of empty beds were published in the 1970s and 1980s. Readers of the Journal may therefore be surprised to find six articles on tuberculosis (TB) in this one issue in 2008.1-6 Far from having dis-appeared, TB is the dis-ease that still affects the dis-placed, the dis-advantaged, the dis-possessed, the dis-rupted and those with dis-abled immune systems.

1 WHO Supranational TB Reference Laboratory.
2 Department of Health and Community Services, Darwin, NT.

Correspondence: ivan.bastian@imvs.sa.gov.au

Competing interests:

Ivan Bastian attended a tuberculosis meeting in Palm Cove, Queensland, in July 2000, which was partly sponsored by CSL, the then manufacturer of the QuantiFERON assay mentioned here. Cellestis is now the manufacturer of this assay.

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