My experience as a (sort of) TB patient taught me something about respiratory illnesses

Physicians knew from tuberculosis how best to treat respiratory ailments -- it was to get patients out into the sun...So why did we send Covid patients to hospitals?

When I was in college, I had a bad cough that I couldn’t get rid of.

I’d been coughing for two weeks or more when I finally went to the campus health clinic.

The doctor, I suppose out of an abundance of caution, took a chest x-ray. Clipping it up on the wall, he pointed to what appeared to be a large mass on one of my lungs. It was the size of a silver dollar, he said.

He asked if I’d been out of the country and if so, where. I told him I was in Russia the year before, and had also traveled to Poland and Slovakia.

He had the nurse give me a skin test for tuberculosis, just in case.

It came back positive.

At this point, things quickly took a turn.

The doctor grabbed his file and said that we’d finish the appointment outside.

We walked swiftly down the stairs and out the back door of the building, and finished the appointment under a tree behind the clinic.

It was of course to get me out of the building, because TB is so highly contagious that germs from one of my coughs could hang in the air for hours, infecting dozens of other students and staff, as the doctor explained to me.

But it was also certainly because doctors have known for more than 100 years that for highly contagious respiratory infections, the cure is to go outside.

An article in The Atlantic published in March of 2020 noted that the sanatoriums that began opening in the United States and Europe in the late 1880s to treat patients with TB were specifically designed so that the patients could spend maximum time in the sunshine and fresh air, to cure them of the illness.

They would be placed outside in the sun even on winter days, bundled against the cold.

Children at Abergele Sanatorium in Wales. The sanatorium opened in 1910, to treat tuberculosis patients.

The saying “Sunlight is the best disinfectant” — a favorite among journalists referring to the power of exposing something that had been hidden — was not originally metaphorical. It was meant quite literally — sunlight actually does disinfect.

The saying probably first appeared in an article published in 1879 in the journal The Laws of Health. See clip below:

I didn’t have TB, as it turned out. I’d gone to the local hospital for a sputum test, as directed by the doctor, and it came back negative.

The x-ray hadn’t shown a blot on one of my lungs the size of a silver dollar, after all: What we were looking at was a confluence of blood vessels that came together in one tangled mass that, on the x-ray, had appeared as a single blob.

But I still had to go on the six-month course of antibiotics, and was told that for the rest of my life, if I take a TB test, it will always come back positive.

As a result of this experience, I’ve thought a bit about tuberculosis over the years, and have taken note of things I happen to read about it.

I’ve long known that sunlight was used to help cure those with TB and that it has special powers to “zap” bacteria.

It seemed an obvious that it would help Covid patients, also.

When my son and I both got Covid in the summer of 2021, we suffered for more than a week, but first began to feel significantly better after sitting outside in the yard, with our faces to the hot sun.

I remember my son in particular, then 11 years old.

He sat there in the camp chair for a few minutes with his face turned up to the blazing summer sun, and then went inside and blew his nose. He came back and told me that all the mucus that was inside him came out into the Kleenex. After that, his nasal passages were clear and remained clear.

When we look back at our government’s response to Covid, it will be interesting to hear what people say when asked why they did not take Covid patients out into the sunlight as doctors at sanatoriums once did with TB patients.

It’s not possible that they didn’t know of the curative properties of sunshine and fresh air.

And it will be interesting, if hearings are ever held, or questions ever asked in some other forum, to hear policymakers explain why they closed beaches, when the beach would have been the most healthful place for people to be.

In the documentary, The Real Anthony Fauci, which premiered yesterday, Oct. 18, Dr. Peter McCullough describes the care he ordered for his father, who got Covid-19 in a nursing home.

He says the first thing he did was order that the windows be opened.

Most nursing homes and hospitals in the United States, regrettably, don’t have windows that open.

During the pandemic, patients were sealed inside, most spending every day in their rooms, with no access to sunshine or fresh air.

It’s worth contemplating how different things might have been if they’d been able to spend their days outside, with their faces to the sun.