Letter to the Editor: Lessons to be learned from a generation razed by TB
On Sunday, March 22, Mother’s Day, I took a walk up to Clonminch Cemetery in Tullamore to visit my mother’s grave.
Not a regular habit of mine I must add as I don’t even participate in the annual Cemetery Sunday service.
However, this time, for some reason or other, I felt compelled to visit her grave and the grave of my extended family members.
I’m sort of putting the visit down to the current Covid-19 challenges, and the potentially life-threatening impacts this pandemic can have on families if we don’t follow the simple guidelines issued by the health professionals and broadcast daily on the airwaves and in print.
While I was reading the names on the headstones, I was starkly reminded of a story my father told us as children.
He often told us of the time he had to carry his sister Angela home from Birmingham in his arms as her body was so emaciated from the ravages of the virus of their time, tuberculosis or TB — more commonly known at that time as “consumption”.
It is probably no exaggeration to say that Ireland’s greatest public health problem in the first half of the 20th century was by all accounts tuberculosis.
The 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s was a terrible time for families in Ireland as they lost thousands of family members to TB.
From 1939 until the year I was born, 1949, over 43,000 deaths attributed to tuberculosis were recorded. Four of my aunts and one uncle died of TB in No 2, Chapel Street, Tullamore.
They were:
- Bridget Roche, died April 17, 1927, aged 22 years;
- Alice Roche, died April 23, 1930, aged 18 years;
- Bernard Roche, died January 24, 1934, aged 18 years;
- Joan Roche, died July 19, 1934, aged 14 years;
- Angela Roche died March 11, 1940, aged 21 years.
May they rest in peace.
The World Health Organization (WHO) tells us TB has not gone away. According to the WHO, TB remains one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide.
I wonder if my aunts and uncle had had the luxury of self-isolation, as we do today, would they have died?
Today we are asked to follow a few simple rules in order to minimise the impact of the coronavirus.
So please follow instructions and hopefully you and your loved ones will be spared the terrible pain of losing someone close to this terrible pandemic.
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