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Tuberculosis in Ireland — a lesson from history
What Irish history shows is that governments can improve public health when the will is there to do it, writes HELEN O’CONNOR

THE Covid-19 crisis is not the very first time that contagious disease has existed and lessons can be learned from how the Irish government got to grips with a tuberculosis crisis in 1940s Ireland.

Tuberculosis is a highly infectious disease that ravaged Ireland at the beginning of this century.

Tuberculosis used to kill more than 10,000 people per year in Dublin alone. There was a stigma around getting tuberculosis in those days and it was known as a “poor person’s disease.”

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