ReThink History: The White Plague Returns

For two generations Americans treated tuberculosis as a disease of the past. Then it came back. In 2024 the United States counted more than ten thousand cases, the most since 2011, and 2025 was barely lower. A Kansas outbreak became one of the largest documented in the country in decades. In Alaska, the rate is four times the national rate, and three in four cases are among Alaska Native people. The White Plague Returns is a twelve-part ReThink History series on how we nearly beat TB and then let it back in. It begins with consumption and Robert Koch's discovery, then moves to the sanatoria and the evacuations that took Alaska Native patients far from home. It covers streptomycin, the first miracle drug, which TB began resisting almost at once, and the years when the money and the expertise quietly went away. In New York in the early 1990s, drug-resistant TB made "watch every dose" the national standard. The series ends with today's funding cuts, video-observed therapy on a phone, and AI that promises to watch for us. The series is told partly from the vantage of a retired anesthesiologist who, between 2010 and 2016 in Anchorage, cared for patients whose active TB had not been disclosed before surgery. It tests one idea honestly, including the evidence against it: tuberculosis returns whenever we stop watching. New here? Start with Episode 1, The Disease We Thought We'd Beaten, at the top of this playlist. Researched and compiled by Nick Mackenzie. Narrated by AI from a sourced research dossier.

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