Irish Examiner view: TB is still a killer, and we can't let it thrive due to complacency 

World Health Organization warns that tuberculosis, dubbed 'the forgotten disease', is back with a vengeance

Then president Sean T O'Kelly visiting a young patient during the official opening of a 50-bed  tuberculosis (TB) unit at St Raphael's, Montenotte, Cork, in September 1948. File picture: Irish Examiner Archive

Covid-19 and its variants grab the headlines, but coming up on our blind side is a worrying increase in tuberculosis — a disease which, like smallpox and malaria, we thought we could control and ultimately defeat.

TB, once known as the ‘White Plague’, is back with a vengeance, says the WHO, which identifies it as the second biggest infectious killer after Covid, claiming 4,100 lives every day around the world. During the pandemic, rates of infection increased for the first time in more than a decade.