Once believed to be easily treated and prevented, Tuberculosis (TB) has recently been making a steady comeback. Previous to modern medicine, TB claimed millions of victims, spreading from person to person like wildfire. Around the 17th-18th centuries, the “White Plague” took the lives of 1 in 5 adults (20%) in Europe and North America (Iseman, 1994). However, as technological advances progressed, this seemingly ferocious viral disease became a primal, insignificant thing of the past. But, in the nature of all bacteria, TB has, in the recent years, mutated to become progressively drug resistant. Why is Tuberculosis coming back with a vengeance? Well, the answer’s quite simple. TB has done an amazing job of standing in the corner and designing a full-proof plan. In the 1990’s, while more seemingly serious infectious diseases such as HIV and AIDS fought against TB for attention, capital, and research, HIV and AIDS won the battle (Interlandi, 2010). "The hope was that the resistant strains would just fizzle out over time, but that didn’t happen.” (Keshavjee, 2010) One major difference between TB and HIV is that Tuberculosis seeks out its victims, where victims seek out HIV. As “intolerant” as this may sound, those who have HIV have mainly themselves and their recent ancestors to blame. With premarital sex and homosexuality, HIV and AIDS survive. It was preposterous that TB was overlooked. Those who believe that it’s through human actions that TB has survived are incredibly incorrect, in my opinion. TB’s origin may be of human decent, however, it’s a bacteria and, well, bacteria don’t like to die. By this I mean that bacteria will survive by any means necessary. Michael D. Iseman of the University of Colorado School of Medicine would m...
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The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston is an intriguing book that discusses the anthrax terrorist attacks after 9/11 and how smallpox might become a future bioterrorist threat to the world. The book provides a brief history of the smallpox disease including details of an outbreak in Germany in 1970. The disease was eradicated in 1979 due to the World Health Organization’s aggressive vaccine program. After the virus was no longer a treat the World Health Organization discontinued recommending the smallpox vaccination. In conjunction, inventory of the vaccine was decreased to save money. The virus was locked up in two labs, one in the United States and one in Russia. However, some feel the smallpox virus exists elsewhere. Dr. Peter Jahrling and a team of scientists at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Maryland became concerned terrorists had access to the smallpox virus and planed to alter the strain to become more resistant. These doctors conducted smallpox experiments to discover more effective vaccines in case the virus were released. Preparedness for a major epidemic is discussed as well as the ease with which smallpox can be bioengineered.
Guillemin, J. (2005). Biological weapons: From the invention of state-sponsored programs to contemporary bioterrorism Columbia University Press.
Paul Farmer was born in Massachusetts in 1959, went to Harvard Medical School, became a doctor, and ended up living and working in Haiti. He co-founded an organization in 1987 called Partners in Health (PIH). The philosophy behind the organization is that everyone, no matter who or where has a right to health care. Paul Farmer and PIH have already made amazing progress in Haiti, Peru, and several other countries, helping people get the care they need. PIH’s website lists a detailed history of they and Farmer’s work in Haiti. When Paul Farmer first came to Cange, Haiti as a medical student in 1983, the place was in shambles. In 1956, a dam was built on the Artibonite River, flooding the village and forcing the residents to move up into the hills. Many of these displaced villagers were still essentially homeless after nearly thirty years, and had little access to quality health care. With the founding of the Zanmi Lasante clinic later in 1983, Farmer and his friend Ophelia Dahl set the people of Cange on the road to recovery by providing access to doctors, medicine, and emergency care, all completely free. (“Partners”) One of Farmer’s focuses was on tuberculosis (TB) and has had much success on this front. Through new studies and methods such as active case finding and community health workers, as well as his work with multidrug-resistant TB, Paul Farmer has revolutionized treatment of tuberculosis in Haiti and around the world.
the bubonic plague. Like the bubonic plague did in the Middle Ages, AIDS is spreading at an alarming rate. In 1994 seventeen million people around the world were
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.
Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was first recognized as a new disease in 1981 when increasing numbers of young homosexual men succumbed to unusual opportunistic infections and rare malignancies (Gallant49).During this time, many people were contacting this disease because it was not discovered yet and people did not have knowledge about it.Scientists believe HIV came from a particular kind of chimpanzee in Western Africa. Humans contracted this disease when they hunted and ate infected animals. A first clue came in 1986 when a morphologically similar but antigenically distinct virus was found to cause AIDS in patients in western Africa (Goosby24). During this time, scientists had more evidence to support their claim about this disease. Once discovered this disease was identified as a cause of what has since become one of the most devastating infectious diseases to have emerged in recent history (Goosby101). This disease was deadly because it was similar to the Black Death, it was killing majority of the population. Since its first identification almost three decades ago, the pandemic form of HIV-1 has infected at least 60 million people and caused more than 25 million deaths ...
Omicinski, John. “Tet Offensive 30 years ago: A turning point of Last Half-Century.” USA Today. Jan. 31, 1998. SIRS Researcher. Waubonsie Valley H. S. Lib., Aurora, IL. 3 May 2007 .
Tuberculosis (TB) is the most common disease worldwide which caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. With close to 10 million new cases per year, and a pool of two billion latently infected individuals, control efforts are struggling in many parts of the world (The bacteria usually attack the lungs, but they can also damage other parts of the body (Comas and Gagneux, 2009). It is important for a nurse to understand how tuberculosis develops, how to diagnosis, treatment, and prevent.
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.
Bibliography:.. References 1) Lewis, Ricki, “The Rise of Antibiotic-Resistant Infections”. Food and Drug Administration Publications. http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/795_antibio.html September, 1995. 2) Levy, S., Bittner, M., and Salyers, A. Ask the Experts about “Ask the Experts”.
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 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).
In the 1960s, doctors in the United States predicted that infectious diseases were in decline. US surgeon Dr. William H. Stewart told the nation that it had already seen most of the frontiers in the field of contagious disease. Epidemiology seemed destined to become a scientific backwater (Karlen 1995, 3). Although people thought that this particular field was gradually dying, it wasn’t. A lot more of it was destined to come. By the late 1980s, it became clear that people’s initial belief of infectious diseases declining needed to be qualified, as a host of new diseases emerged to infect human beings (Smallman & Brown, 2011).With the current trends, the epidemics and pandemics we have faced have created a very chaotic and unreliable future for mankind. As of today, it has really been difficult to prevent global epidemics and pandemics. Although the cases may be different from one state to another, the challenges we all face are all interconnected in this globalized world.
Throughout human history, disease has been linked to many facets of life and even the rise and fall of entire civilizations. Biological, social, political and economic forces have all influenced how the outbreak of disease is handled. Epidemics have altered history in how they have developed and the impact that they have had. In turn, epidemic management has been influenced by history and governments as humans have learned to cope with outbreaks and the social and political implications that result from them. Today, biomedical engineers, politicians, historians and social scientists are leading the battle in an attempt to understand and combat infectious diseases.
...cy on biological warfare. During his visit to Fort Detrick, he announced that the United States would terminate all research on biological weapons. By the year 1972 the United States had completely destroyed all biological weapon stockpile. In return of this act the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention was held, As a result of 118 countries signed a agreeing not to develop, produce, or stockpile any form of biological weapon(Mayer p4). Unfortunately despite many laws passed over time, few countries have abided by them. Evidence of this came in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s there were reports that the Soviet Union was using biological weapons in Laos, Kampuchea, and Afghanistan (Mayer p 4).