Introduction

In 1993, one hundred and eleven years after the causative organism for tuberculosis (TB) was identified, and half a century after the introduction of clinically effective therapy, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the disease a global emergency (WHO 1994). This recognition that the public health community had effectively failed to control such a long-understood and treatable infection is unprecedented. The global strategy in response to the current emergency has centred on the development and implementation of directly observed therapy, short course (DOTS). In a few short years, DOTS has become the dominant strategy in the widely supported, global campaign against the disease, and has proven effective in treating many individual cases around the world.

While the battle against TB is one spanning many centuries, there are notable features of the current crisis that closely link it to the impacts of globalisation on health. Indeed, TB control is a useful case study for understanding how health policy is being shaped by globalisation and, in turn, how globalisation in its current form is being reinforced by such health policies. Globalisation in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is a process changing human societies in complex ways, ‘as capital, traded goods, persons, concepts, images, ideas, and values diffuse across state boundaries’ (Hurrell and Woods 1995).