what IS tuberculosis, why is it so deadly, and why did it take humanity so long to be able to treat it
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TB is a bacterium that causes organ lesions, usually in the lungs but you can get them elsewhere. Affected lung tissue can’t work properly, so you ultimately die from organ failure.
The answers to your last two questions are the same: because it took us a long time to understand it. You have to remember that germ theory wasn’t widely accepted until the late 19th/early 20th centuries. Before that people had all kinds of crazy ideas about what caused diseases. Once we realized what bacteria were and how they worked, we identified antibiotic cures and vaccines relatively quickly.
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