The number of people in the UK with tuberculosis (TB) has nearly doubled over the past 25 years, but for most of us the chances of catching the infection are still relatively small. Three quarters of all infections recorded last year were in people from deprived areas; half were not in employment, and one in ten had at least one social risk factor such as poor housing. In these cases, people's immune systems may not be robust due to health problems or poor diet. TB is also more common in people from countries where it is endemic: about three quarters of those diagnosed in the UK every year were born outside the UK. One of the biggest problems in dealing with the new prevalence of TB is that the current generation of doctors is largely unfamiliar with it so they don't even consider the diagnosis.