WOMAN: I have no idea.
MAN: Maybe cholera?
MAN: Infectious disease...
WOMAN: Probably Ebola?
WOMAN: Maybe the flu or something… the flu?
WOMAN: HIV?
MAN: Is it Tuberculosis?
MAN: I’m gonna guess TB.
– Is it really TB? – Oh, it’s TB? And we’ve never heard of it.
– That is shocking actually. – Yeah, that’s bad!
I’ve kind of always associated TB with smoking.
WOMAN: Doesn’t it affect the lungs? And there’s mucus and stuff?
Yeah, I have no idea what tubercu…. I can’t even say the word.
WOMAN: What’s his name? … King Henry VIII’s son died of it.
– It’s like a… – A lung infection right?
Is it an STI?
TIM WALKER: TB is a bacterial infection,
but it is a particularly nasty one.
It’s the most common killer of all infectious diseases in the world.
NARRATOR: Around 4,700 people die of TB every day, worldwide.
And despite it being one of the oldest and most deadly diseases,
none of the world's 195 countries have been able to eradicate it.
TIM: On a global scale, TB is not a big problem in the UK,
but compared to other Western European countries we have more than our fair share.
We see 6,000 to 7,000 cases a year.
EMILE: In late 2009, I was in America on vacation, on holiday,
and I found a lump in lymph nodes.
ANDREA: I woke up with a crazy pain in my chest, like here, and it was…
my arm was feeling numb and really strange.
BEVERLEY: I got a bit of a flu virus bug,
and wasn’t feeling that well.
It took a few weeks to get over it, but I had this lingering cough.
EMILE: I remember going in and seeing the registrar, and she said,
“Well, I’m pleased to tell you you don’t have cancer, but you have TB.”
That’s an old disease, how have I got TB, how is that actually even possible?
ANDREA: The doctor, for example, said,
“You can get it everywhere –
You can even get it on the subway in Vienna”... where I was living.
NARRATOR: TB spreads when those who are ill with the disease cough or spit.
TIM: The normal treatment for TB would be four drugs for a period of six months.
Ironically, that’s called short course treatment.
If you have drug resistance, the duration of treatment can extend up to two years.
EMILE: The drug regime, the medication, made me feel extremely ill, constantly being sick.
The physicality of what goes with that,
the rapid weight loss, the physical pain, was immense.
BEVERLEY: For the first two or three months, I was taking eight or nine pills a day.
ANDREA: Nine pills a day... For one year.
NARRATOR: Too many people who are exposed to TB and develop the disease around the globe,
don’t have access to tailored and effective treatment.
TIM: The tragedy of the disease is it’s curable,
but still kills almost 2 million people every year.
NARRATOR: Global efforts to control TB have saved an estimated 53 million lives since 2000.
But the antibiotics that treat the disease have been used for decades.
An alarming number of strains of TB are now resistant to even the best of these drugs.
TIM: Not many people die of multi-drug resistant TB in the UK.
Globally, there are hundreds of thousands that die of different types of drug resistant TB.
WOMAN: It’s something that we could all possibly pick up,
and I think the more educated you are about it, the easier it is to deal with.
WOMAN: It seems very distant to us, but if it’s such a worldwide problem then
clearly it’s closer to home than we think. – Yeah.
NARRATOR: In the race to stop TB, one solution scientists are developing
is using cutting edge technology and simple spit and phlegm tests
to transform the fight against this deadly disease.
The team at the University of Oxford are working on a new handheld test,
which gives a rapid reading of the DNA of a patient’s TB.
TIM: The vision is that this would be a portable test
– a so-called 'lab in a bag' – that could be taken anywhere in the world.
And it means we can deliver the correct treatment to patients who,
at the moment, are just receiving a best guess concoction of tablets, or at worst, none at all.
NARRATOR: The team are also working with scientists across the world
to build a massive global library of TB DNA test results,
to help doctors give patients an accurate diagnosis.
TIM: Once you know which mutations cause drug resistance, you’ll know which drugs to give.
If you can do that accurately, you will reduce the spread of drug resistant TB.