Tuberculosis is an ancient disease, the basis of which was found in Egyptian mummies 5000 years ago, and in ancient China it was called “consumption” and tuberculosis was also called “consumption”. For a long period of history, the disease was only known to be contagious and was called a plague, but its cause was not known. Since 1882, when Koch discovered Mycobacterium tuberculosis as the causative agent of tuberculosis, it has been recognized that tuberculosis is a chronic infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which is an inflammatory reaction caused by the invasion of Mycobacterium tuberculosis into the human body. The source of infection is mainly patients with sputum smear positive for antacid staining (referred to as positive smear). The route of transmission is mainly through the respiratory tract and, to a lesser extent, through the digestive tract (mainly in the era of poorly sterilized milk, which is now largely absent); infection through skin wounds is extremely rare. The susceptible population is those who are not naturally infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis and have not received BCG vaccination. Tuberculosis is a zoonotic disease. In Western countries, there was an epidemic of tuberculosis at the beginning of the industrialization era, resulting in a high mortality rate, and people called tuberculosis the “white plague”, and before the liberation of China, it was said that “nine out of ten people died of consumption”. It was not until the 1950s that mankind had chemotherapy drugs against tuberculosis and the means to treat it. Nowadays, the cure rate of primary tuberculosis patients receiving standardized anti-tuberculosis treatment can reach 90% to 95%, and the recurrence rate after cure is about 5%. However, the prevalence of tuberculosis is still very serious, especially in the past 20 years due to the epidemic of multidrug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis caused by irregular treatment, which again poses a serious threat to human health and is an important public health problem.