At one level, the numbers look good, but if you look again, maybe not. Once upon a time, TB started out as something else, probably some environmental predecessor that lived in watery or other environments, perhaps starting out in another animal, but eventually, it got to humans. There was a ‘patient zero’ for TB, just as there is for all new and emergent pathogens, and for TB, it is guessed that this happened around 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. There is evidence that it has be

As Sun Tzu famously said: ‘know your enemy’, or more correctly: ‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.’ This is true not only for human conflict but in what is probably the greatest and longest running battle the human race has ever engaged in: that between humans and their pathogens. Ultimately, COVID-19, our current enemy of focus, might kill 1%, but hopefully, many fewer now that there is a vaccine and better treatments

COVID-19 is not the pandemic I was predicting. Year after year, for just over 10 years a new class of about 150 young, smart medical students would come to my lectures on medical bacteriology and infection at Oxford. I would explain what things contribute to virulence (what makes pathogens dangerous); most years I would get them to play an online game in which a pandemic was simulated and from which they would learn some key things, with a prize for the person who could take