Tuberculosis: Modernizing the fight against an ancient scourge

March 24 marks the anniversary of the discovery in 1882 by German microbiologist Robert Koch of the bacterium that causes tuberculosis (TB). With that knowledge in hand, one might expect that by now we would have the disease under control. Tragically, this is not the case. In 2013, thousands of years after the first human cases of TB were recorded and more than a century after Koch isolated the rod-shaped microbe that causes TB, this disease remains entrenched in many countries around the world.