As Singapore and the rest of the world battle the covid 19 pandemic, the history of infectious diseases provides some lessons on how their spread is affected by social and cultural factors, and cannot be resolved with purely medical responses. Today, we speak to historian Dr Loh Kah Seng and Associate Professor Hsu Li Yang, an infectious diseases expert, on their book “Tuberculosis – The Singapore Experience, 1867–2018, Disease, Society and the State”.