Arkansas’s Long War on Tuberculosis
NEARLY 6,000 ARKANSANS died from the Covid-19 virus in the first twelve-months of this lethal pandemic, from April 2020 through March 2021. The deadly illness reminds us of the power of natural forces impervious to modern science and of our vulnerability in the face of newly emerging disease. Even in the age of space travel, instant communication, and unparalleled affluence, we live in a world of nature indifferent to our progress, our needs, and our desires.
Imagine a time in Arkansas when a hidden killer took lives at a rate equal to or greater than Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021, and continued this grim harvest year after year, decade after decade, throughout the nineteenth century and far into the twentieth. Many of the years in the first two decades of the twentieth century, tuberculosis took the lives of some 3,000 Arkansans, at a time when the state’s population was about one-third its present number. This was the scourge of tuberculosis—an endemic menace to much of society in Arkansas and the rest of the nation. Tenacious and far beyond a passing pandemic, the Great Killer has killed more in the United States and the world than any disease in history.