ABSTRACT
Tuberculosis (TB) is certainly the disease that has provoked the most damage to mankind throughout history. It has caused death and disease for perhaps >20 000 years and, as a rule, has affected the poorest strata of the society. Such a long time of common life with men has endowed Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causal agent, with the best adaptation among all known human pathogens. Therefore, it has remained in a quiescent state within a large number of individuals – around 2000 million people – generating neither symptoms nor disease, but surviving and awaiting more suitable conditions to attack.1
