The 49 th World Congress on Lung Health held in The Hague, Netherlands concluded on 27 October 2018. Four thousand delegates from over one hundred countries gathered for five days to review progress, and sometimes the lack of progress, against what is now the largest communicable disease on the planet. Worldwide there are ten million new infections each year and 1.6 million die – approximately 4,400 each day.  As HIV/AIDS has increasingly been brought under control, the death toll per year from tuberculosis (TB) has surpassed that from AIDS as annual deaths from HIV infection have fallen to approximately 1.3 million. However, while HIV is an infectious disease transmitted primarily through unprotected sex, TB is a contagious disease that like influenza can be transmitted through the air, although not nearly as easily as flu can be. TB is caused by a mycobacterium, a small bacterium that is much larger than a cold or flu virus and is thus more difficult to transmit. Still, TB is...