Ireland Anti-Tuberculosis Campaign

The Ireland Anti-Tuberculosis Campaign was the national effort to eradicate tuberculosis led by Noel Browne after he became Ireland's Minister for Health in February 1948. Browne directed funds from the Irish Hospitals' Sweepstake, comprising just over 10 million pounds in 1948, toward dramatically expanding hospitals and sanatoriums, creating the National Blood Transfusion Association, and introducing free X-ray testing for tuberculosis, while the new antibiotic streptomycin also became available during the campaign. The campaign produced a dramatic fall in tuberculosis mortality: 1955 was the first year since the founding of the state in which fewer than a thousand people died of the disease, and by 1960 the death rate from tuberculosis had fallen by more than eighty percent from its peak.