The PBS television series American Experience will broadcast an episode on tuberculosis, titled "The Forgotten Plague" featuring Clarkson University professor Andrea Cooper. She is also a Trudeau Institute partner.

The program will show nationwide next Tuesday, Feb. 10. Locally, it will be on at 9 p.m. on WPBS and Mountain Lake PBS.

Cooper's laboratory studies tuberculosis, which is responsible for more deaths worldwide than any other bacterial infection. The bacterium causing tuberculosis has existed within the human population since antiquity and can manipulate the human immune response to achieve its own goals.

Cooper’s laboratory is working to understand precisely how the bacterium alters the immune response in order to improve vaccines against tuberculosis and other diseases of the lung. Understanding how the body responds to bacteria also helps elucidate what exactly is taking place when the immune response goes wrong, as can happen in autoimmune and chronic inflammatory disease.