In one of his public lectures in Odessa in 1888 Ilia Mechnikov stated that 1/5 of all the deaths on Earth is caused by tuberculosis. And although the agent of this cruel disease has been discovered in 1882 by Robert Koch, it continues to deprive prematurely the mankind of the people, among them such remarkable ones as Spinoza, Chopin, Belinsky, Nadson etc.

TB disease or the White plague is known from the ancient times. Examination of the remains of primitive man and the ancient Egyptian mummies has revealed that their bones bear the traces of tuberculosis. In Mesopotamia Code of the King Hammurabi stated the right to divorce your wife, if she had TB. Hippocrates was writing about the spread of tuberculosis in Ancient Greece. The consequences of tuberculosis were registered in the study of human skeletons from the graves of the Medieval Kyiv.

International League of Fighting with Tuberculosis was organized at the threshold of the 20th century. Cross of Lorraine was adopted as a symbol of anti-tuberculosis movement in 1902 – the red cross with two horizontal stripes. Soon after that White Flower day was established in Switzerland. On the 1st of May, 1908 the young men and women were selling white flowers on the streets of Geneva, proceeds from which were transferred to the Anti-Tuberculosis Fund. This custom had been adopted in other countries of Northern and Western Europe and then in Russia.

In the beginning of the 20th century Russia occupied the first place among the European countries in the mortality of the population from tuberculosis. All-Russian League against tuberculosis had started its activities in 1910. In April 1911 League had organized the White Flower days, the symbol of which became the Daisy. Saint-Petersburg, Moscow, Minsk, Riga, Kyiv, Kharkov, Odessa and many other cities of the Russian Empire had participated in this activity. In Yalta among the white flower sellers were the members of the Romanov House – tsarevich Alexei and his four sisters. The annual celebrations of the White Flower day had been stopped in Russia after the October revolution.

At present tuberculosis remains one of the most common diseases: according to the statistics 1/3 of mankind is infected with its germs. In the post-Soviet space this disease, which was considered endangered, acquired epidemic form. And 100 years later after its first creation the tradition of the White flower day is back in the countries of CIS (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine).