World War I and Tuberculosis. A Statistical Summary and Review

Tuberculosis and World War I

“…Tuberculosis mortality in both the United States and France remained constant between 1913 and 1917 and did not show the wartime increases seen in several other countries; postwar values, however, did show the expected steep drop in mortality (7). Germany, Austria, and Hungary had typical increases in mortality during warfare, but in 1920 the levels had not yet fallen below the 1913 (prewar) values.…”

“…Findings Figure 1 shows that from 1885 to 1914, tuberculosis mortality rates declined progressively in England-Wales, Scotland, Belgium, Denmark, and the Netherlands, but less impressively in Ireland (7). Then in 1914, mortality increased sharply and dramatically during wartime until after its end in 1918.…”

“…A way of documenting the effects on tuberculosis mortality in various countries during WWI is to compare rates per 100,000 inhabitants before, during, and after the war: in 1913 (prewar), in 1917 (midwar), and in 1920 (postwar) (7). (Because the first wave of the global pandemic of influenza erupted in March 1918, death rates that year were spuriously elevated; by 1920, the influenza effect had largely dissipated.…”

Achievements in and Challenges of Tuberculosis Control in South Korea

“…Most of these countries were recovering from the repercussions of World War I (1914–1918). For example, in England and Wales, the TB death rate reached its peak (135.8 deaths/100,000 population) when the war ended in 1918, but then the rate steadily decreased from 76.7 to 53.6 per 100,000 population during 1926–1942 ( 7 , 8 ). North America followed nearly the same trend as that of Western Europe.…”

Bacterial genomic epidemiology, from local outbreak characterization to species-history reconstruction

“…This is consistent both with Chinese immigration episodes, as noted above, and with the deprivations caused by war conditions and the co-mortality due to the influenza pandemics of that time. 58 The only decrease in population size detected coincides with the advent of antibiotics and mass vaccinations around the 1960s. It has to be kept in mind that the expansion of the two sublineages more associated with antibiotic resistance, CC1 and CC2, predates this event.…”