Writing in the International Herald Tribune, Gro Brundtland, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), and James Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank, urged governments to adopt a WHO program that involves a six-month course of the therapy, supervised by health-care workers. The program uses a $10 combination of drugs designed to combat new resistant strains of the disease. "If the global community could raise an additional $900 million annually, deaths from tuberculosis could fall dramatically within a decade, and the disease could disappear during the lifetime of today's children," they wrote. The article was aptly entitled, "Tuberculosis Can Go If We Care."

By 1998, 96 governments had adopted the WHO program, up from 19 five years earlier when it was introduced. But this only covers 10 percent of known cases worldwide.

The authors said the Afghan people, forced by the round-the-clock U.S. and British bombing to leave the country's cities, are particularly vulnerable. "In Afghanistan and Pakistan, two countries already dealing with high infection rates and now home to hundreds of thousands of refugees living in cramped conditions along the common border, the risk of even more people falling victim to the disease is very real," they wrote.

The spread of HIV-AIDS, which breaks down the body's immune system, is a major factor in the increase in deaths by TB around the globe, leading some experts to speak of a "co-epidemic." TB flourishes in crowded and unsanitary living conditions, afflicting working people in the semi-colonial countries, the workers states in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and depressed urban and rural areas in imperialist countries.

A 1998 WHO report noted, "The foreign debt crisis of the 1980s made many countries reduce their support for health and social services.... Today, nearly 1.3 billion people live in absolute poverty, which is the major cause of undernourishment and ill health." WHO estimates that 95 percent of the 8 million people who contract TB each year live in semicolonial countries.

The problem is not confined to the Third World, however. According to a WHO document, in "1999 about 370,000 TB cases have been reported in the 51 member states of the...European region. Most occur in central and eastern European countries and the newly independent states of the former USSR."

Between 1984 and 1992 the incidence of TB in the United States increased by 20 percent, sweeping through prisons and striking particularly hard at AIDS sufferers. A 1998 U.S. study showed that the rate of TB infection among the Black population was eight times that among whites.

Among infectious diseases, TB, which has also been referred to as consumption, has taken more lives than any other in human history. A century ago, one in every seven people died of it. Under capitalism it is among the diseases that strike working people owing to the conditions imposed by the employers and their government.

For example, the disease was among the afflictions suffered by children employed in producing lace, described by Frederick Engels, a cofounder with Karl Marx of the modern communist movement, in his classic 1845 study of capitalist exploitation, The Condition of the Working Class in England. They included "general debility, frequent fainting...curvature of the spine, scrofula [a form of tuberculosis] and consumption."

In the first volume of Capital, published in 1867, Marx wrote that "scrofula attacking the glands, or bones, or other parts of the body, is a disease of two-thirds or more of the potters" in England's industrial districts. The condition was commonly known as "potter's asthma" or "potter's consumption."  
 
 
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