Crowded rooms
Boarding houses, wards and some workplaces share air long enough for nuclei to matter.
TB tracks poverty, prisons, shelters and poorly ventilated work. It also tracks HIV and aging in some countries.
Stigma still delays care. Public language should be disease, not blame.
Body interfaces
Korea programmes
Screening, BCG history and treatment support cut incidence from a high OECD baseline.
HIV overlap
Where HIV is common, TB is a leading killer of people living with the virus.
Stigma
Fear of isolation can hide a cough. Confidential care is part of control.
Drug resistance
Incomplete therapy and poor drug quality select harder-to-treat strains — a system failure more than a moral one.
BCG scar memory
Many adults in East Asia carry a scar from infant BCG. It is not a guarantee against adult lung disease.
A person with weeks of cough needs a clinic, not a self-plan from this atlas.
Keep exploring
More in Encounters
Influenza
A winter respiratory virus of drift and rare shift — surveillance and vaccines, not a cartoon villain.
Familiarity 93Escherichia coli
Usually a gut resident; a minority of STEC pathotypes drive foodborne headlines.
Familiarity 82Staphylococcus aureus
A common skin neighbor and a resistance story called MRSA — not scare porn.
Familiarity 78Norovirus
A very-low-dose gut virus of schools and ships — soap and bleach surfaces, not alcohol-gel faith.
Familiarity 80Helicobacter pylori
A gastric spiral that rewrote the ulcer textbook — Nobel 2005, Korea's high historic prevalence, no recipes.
Familiarity 68