An ancient disease, Tuberculosis has been ever present throughout mankind’s evolution from a hunter gatherer society to our globalized/industrialized society of the present. While shifts in societal structure has altered its areas of impact, Tuberculosis has always caused a greater number of deaths for those people who are poor and lacking resources for care. The introduction of antibiotics to the world decreased Tuberculosis in countries that had the means to provide prescriptions in mass, however, the sequelae of antibiotic’s inevitable overuse has just led to even more complications, and has shifted Tuberculosis’ path to the most vulnerable of patients, including children. Even as medical advances contribute towards better outcomes, effectively …show more content…
“Hippocrates identified phthisis (the Greek term for tuberculosis) as the most widespread disease of his time” (Harris, 2013, p. 673). Later, Tuberculosis was known as consumption, due to the weight loss associated with having this disease. “By the 17th century, anatomical and pathological descriptions of tuberculosis began to appear in the medical literature. The contagious nature of the disease was suspected as early as 1546 when Girolamo Tracastoro wrote that bed sheets and clothing of a consumptive could contain contagious particles”(Iseman, 2013, para. 2). However, DNA testing of the Granville mummy, in which the person lived around 600BC showed that the mummified individual died of Tuberculosis (Geddes, 2009). 174 years later, Dr. Benjamin Marten surmised that Tuberculosis could be transmitted via contact with a person with active Tuberculosis (Iseman, 2013). Sadly, it took 162 years until a Robert Koch definitively proved that the bacteria, Myobacterium Tuberculosis, was the cause of Tuberculosis. Due to this new-found insight, a seemingly reactionary measure was taken by health officials of the time, and that measure was the use of sanatoriums. However, the concentration of Tuberculosis patients provided physicians and medical researchers a venue to prove or disprove their treatment hypotheses. These hypotheses included inducing a pneumothorax (which had favorable results), reduction of lung volume, and judicious exposure to fresh air (Iseman, 2013). French bacteriologists Calmette and Guerin combined their efforts into a vaccine that bears their names, the Bacille Calmette-Guerin vaccine that was once widely used, but has since been decreasing in use due to its questionable efficacy. After World War II, the discovery of antibiotics, specifically streptomycin, resulted in a massive increase in favorable outcomes for patients diagnosed with
Its epidemiological importance is illustrated by World Health Organization Prevention of Tuberculosis includes better living conditions, proper nutrition, and positive health practices” (Fogel, 2015, p.530). Positive health practices include covering nose and mouth when coughing and frequent hand washing. Bacille Calmette-Gurin (BCG) vaccine tends to be given in other countries. Tuberculosis is known as one of the main causes of mortality in the world. This communicable disease is a serious public health conundrum. “The disease still puts a strain on public health, being only second to HIV/AIDS in causing high mortality rates” (Matteelli, Roggi, & Carvalho, 2014, p.
Drug resistance in mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) has become a severe global health threat. The fight against TB is now facing major challenges due to the appearance of Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB) and more recently, the virtually untreatable Extensively Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (XDR-TB). MDR-TB are strains that are resistant to both top first-line drugs, Isoniazid and Rifampin, while XDR-TB are MDR-TB strains that are also resistant to any fluoroquinolone and one or more of 3 injectable drugs. With this new resistance, there emerges a great need to find new drugs that are as effective, yet bypass the problem of resistance. One method of research is to find new vulnerabilities of tuberculosis to use as new target sites of drugs. This method is highly expensive (Scheffler, Colmer, Tynan, Demain, & Gullo, 2013), and requires intense and lengthy research just to implicate the new target site. An alternative is to develop new drugs that work on the same already known target as the first-line drugs, but by a different mechanism, thereby bypassing the resistance of the TB to the drug.
Tuberculosis or known as TB remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the world, especially in developing countries. A combination of factors including high costs, limited resources and the poor performance of various diagnostic tests make the diagnosis of TB difficult in developing countries. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2014), one third of the world’s population is infected with tuberculosis. In 2012, nearly nine million people around the world become sick with tuberculosis disease, and there were around one point three million TB related deaths worldwide.
Tuberculosis or TB, referred to by some as the White death due to the epidemic that arose in Europe that lasted two hundred years, is usually caused by in humans by a microorganism by substrains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. It’s hard to determine the exact years in which TB first infected humans, but since the disease leaves traces on the bone in can be found in archeological record and it is believed to go all the way back to the B.C. era. Although it is hard to tell if the bone damage was truly from TB, there is research that shows that it has been around since the 17th and 18th centuries with a high number of incidences of TB, and in 1882 Dr. Robert Koch announced that his discovery of the causing factor of TB, which is Mycobacterium tuberculosis. A tuberculosis bacterium is spread through the air by an infected person speaking, coughing, or sneezing. Due to the fact the bacteria is protected by a waxy cell all, the body’s defense takes weeks to develop any kind of immunity and it allows the bacteria to exponentially multiply freely within the body. If TB it’s left untreated it will eat rapidly through many tissues, usually beginning with the lungs, lymph nodes, and kidneys. As the infection spreads to the lungs, it causes a cough and fluid between the chest wall and lungs, which leads to chest pains, severe shortness of breath, and potential heart failure. TB also infects bones and joints that can produce arthritis like pain and characteristic bone damage. Another possibility is that it may affect the fluid around the brain, causing meningitis, which can lead to fever, drowsiness, and eventually coma and death (Wingerson, 2009).
Tuberculosis is sometimes called disease of the poor, poverty restricts lots of people to live in a small space, leading to overcrowding. Smaller spaces increase the possibility of M. Tuberculosis to spread and infect an individual. Also immunocompromised individual are susceptible to acquiring tuberculosis. For example, HIV patients, malnourished individual are more susceptible to tuberculosis compared to the average healthy individual. People that are constantly in close range to infected individual are at higher risk of getting infected because, they are more likely to share and breathe the same air. This will lead to inhalation of M. Tuberculosis and might eventually lead to tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis needed to be treated otherwise it can be deadly. It can affect lungs and all other parts ...
Education can be a powerful weapon in fighting tuberculosis in the United States also around the world. Today, it is encouraging how so many people know how TB contracts human and what cause drug resistant effects among those who are under TB treatment.
Throughout many years tuberculosis has atrociously affected the lives of many people. Many have suffered a horrible death due to this horrid disease. Tuberculosis is a highly contagious disease due to mycobacterium tuberculosis, which initiated about one hundred fifty million years ago. Skeletal abnormalities typical for tuberculosis were found in Egyptian mummies back in 2400 BC. In ancient Greece the Greeks seemed very familiar with tuberculosis only they called it Phtisis. Many years later a disease that was called “ scrofula” was described to be a certain form of tuberculosis. It was referred to as “king’s evil” in England and France, and they believed it could be cured by a royal touch. This practice was put to an end in the year 1714.
Smallpox is a disease from the variola virus. Smallpox has caused an estimated number of 300 million deaths in the 1900s alone. Smallpox is said to have been around since the ancient Egyptian times. The disease was eradicated in the late 20th century and two samples are still kept, one in U.S.A and one in Russia. Smallpox creates bumps and blisters all over the body and has been one of the most fatal epidemics the world has seen.
In conclusion, the prospects of controlling or eradicating Tuberculosis will be a difficult and lengthy task. In Social Science & Medicine, Jaramillo (1999) argued that the “current tuberculosis epidemic has persisted because current tuberculosis control programs focus exclusively on the biological cause and fail to take into account an integrated model of the causality of tuberculosis including biological, behavioural, and socioeconomic forces.” Therefore, control and eradication will only be possible with a more active worldwide public health policy with those most vulnerable, for example those who are HIV positive are given extra screening. As HIV keeps global TB infection rates high, only with more effective management of HIV patients will it be possible to control tuberculosis.
In the modern day, Tuberculosis is almost exclusively a threat to third-world and developing nations. It is hard, as members of a modern, industrialized nation, to understand TB's force and its worldwide ramifications without having done research of some sort on the disease. As Americans, the people of this country are almost absolved from feeling any affects of the disease whatsoever. It was not always this way.
Tuberculosis is an infection caused by Mycobacterium Tuberculosis, an acid-fast Gram-positive bacillus, and “is characterized by progressive necrosis of the lung tissue” (Tamaro & Lewis, 2005). Tuberculosis is caused by many debilitating conditions like immunosuppression and chronic lung disease, among others. Nevertheless, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), remains the leading cause of tuberculosis worldwide. Tuberculosis can present in one of two types: active tuberculosis and latent tuberculosis. Prompt treatment prevents latent tuberculosis from evolving into active tuberculosis. (“Basic TB Facts,” 2012).
Tuberculosis in the 1980s were evident through the several years of rising case accounts to its highest point in 1992 this is alarmingly high because the disease travels through the air. As a result, it affects more people, worsening the impact of this disease. It also the impact the lack of education; corrupt living conditions, famine, deprived usage of health care, shortage vaccination charges and poor treatments all contribute to high tuberculosis cases consequence affecting thousand deaths.
‘As people, products, food, and capital travel the world in unprecedented numbers and at historic speeds, so, too, do the myriad of disease-causing microorganisms.’ Increased availability of travel and it’s reduced cost has meant that people are travelling more and thereby passing microorganisms on at a rate that the state simply cannot control. This has been the case with Tuberculosis, which was declared a ‘global emergency by the World Health Organization in 1993’ Cases of Tuberculosis became highly prevalent in developing nations where medicine was too expensive and conditions favoured the spread of microorganisms. Contrastingly, it almost disappeared in western states where there are state hospitals and a welfare system (provided by the state). Tuberculosis became a world threat when levels of immigration increased and immigration-receiving nations experienced an overload of carriers coming from nations where tuberculosis was still a large-scale public health
Mycobacterium tuberculosis has been present in the human population for thousands of years; fragments of the spinal column from Egyptian mummies from 2400 BCE show definite pathological signs of tubercular decay. Called "consumption," tuberculosis was recognized as the leading cause of mortality by 1650. Using a new staining technique, Robert Koch identified the bacterium responsible for causing consumption in 1882. While scientists finally had a target for fighting the disease, they did not have the means to treat patients; the spread of infection was controlled only by attempting to isolate patients. At the turn of the twentieth century, more than 80% of the population in the United States was infected before age 20, and tuberculosis was still the leading cause of death. The production of antibiotics in the 1940’s allowed physicians to begin effectively treating patients, leading to huge drops in the death rate of the disease. Tuberculosis is still a major cause of mortality in young adults worldwide, but is less of a problem in developed countries.