The current dogma is that 2 billion individuals, making up a quarter of the world’s population, are latently infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (1–4). It is thought that latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI), defined by the presence of immunoreactivity to tuberculosis antigens in the absence of clinical and radiologic manifestations of tuberculosis (TB) disease, can reactivate even decades after infection to cause transmissible disease. Therefore, the high prevalence of LTBI is seen as a critical barrier to global TB eradication. Yet our recent analyses of studies spanning 5 decades find that the majority of TB-immunoreactive individuals have cleared their infection while retaining immunological memory of it (5, 6). Three lines of evidence suggest that this is the case (5–7): 1) Longitudinalstudiesshowthatof the minority of infected individuals who progress to disease, most do so within months to 2 years; 2) TB immunoreactivity can persist after curative TB treatment; 3) The majority of TB-immunoreactive individuals have cleared infection as evidenced by their failure to get TB disease even after profound immunosuppression. Based on these findings, it appears that the number of people harboring live M. tuberculosis is substantially lower than previously thought (8). Work published over the last several decades indicates that many TB experts have come to similar conclusions as our recent analyses (5, 6). How then did latent TB infection come to be seen as a lifetime sentence?