Quarantine

Photo: The Children of Craig-y-nos -three of us on the balcony (I am on the left ) We lived outside all year round in order to get the “fresh air” treatment.
 
This afternoon I got invited, along with medical historian Dr Carole Reeves, to talk about our book The Children of Craig-y-nos   to the Swansea branch of the U3A (former university of the Third Age), all on zoom of course.
 
It seemed strange after all this time, over 60 years, to be talking about life in this children’s TB sanatorium where I and many other children were “locked away” or quarantined for years, in my case four years and one day.
It was a remote castle, former home of opera diva Adelina Patti , in the Swansea valley.
 
This was an odd experience, yet in some ways it resonates with Covid and our current lockdown. For this reason I got asked to talk about it for the BBC World News Witness History programme.
 
Does quarantine work? Dr Reeves told our virtual audience this afternoon that research shows it doesn’t because of cross infection (I caught TB again while in the sanatorium which resulted in another two years there).
She says there is no evidence to show that those who were quarantined did better or worse than those who weren’t.
 
Tom Jones, the Welsh singer, had TB as a teenager and his mother looked after him. She refused to allow him to go to a sanatorium and he remained in bed at home for two years.
 
Apparently the only successful quarantine is in a person's own home.
(Ironically today we are bundling travellers into airport hotels if they have come from Covid hotspots.)
 
Oh yes, here is an interesting fact I learnt this afternoon:
 
   
In 2019 there were 1.4 million deaths from TB worldwide and last year 1.8 million from Covid.