Phrenic Crush

Hugh Pennington

The Return of the White Plague: Global Poverty and the ‘New’ Tuberculosis edited by Matthew Gandy and Alimuddin Zumla

For something to return, it has first to go away. In Asia, Africa and Latin America, TB never did go away; in richer countries it was only driven down to lurk in the places inhabited by society’s rejects. It didn’t disappear completely from among society’s paid-up members: its germs sleep in me today. I have a Ghon focus in my left lung, a collection of cells, some from my immune system, which wall off the tubercle bacilli that infected me more than half a century ago during my childhood in the North of England. Calcium salts have built up and settled in it over the years, so it shows on a chest X-ray.

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Hugh Pennington is chair of the public inquiry into the 2005 South Wales E.coli outbreak. He lives in Aberdeen.