Tuberculosis And Its Effects On Society Essay

Now, scientists are warning signs of risks of tuberculosis and share information about bacterias and viruses. Today, when a new germ is known, they have a better chance of learning how to cure and fight it. Volunteers take the time to help in laborites in the United States, South America, Central America, and Asia. The World Health Organization reports that third of the world’s population is infected and eight million people get sick from tuberculosis that is identified to be helped by medicine from spreading the disease to

While tuberculosis was never completely eliminated, there was a significant drop in cases and death rates, as a result of the BCG vaccine and new anti-tubercular drugs in the 1950’s.

Tuberculosis is a deadly disease that is now affecting our world and the people living in it in a horrible way. Due to many factors such as poverty, HIV/AIDS, and lack of health care, many third world and developing countries have been left very vulnerable to tuberculosis. It is affecting a large part of these countries and is leading them deeper into poverty and sickness. The effort to help these countries against tuberculosis has only been slightly effective against this widespread and destructive disease.

Tuberculosis patients could consult private pulmonologists, but they had to pay for the visits and for the very expensive second-line drugs the pulmonologists prescribed. Farmer and Kim and Bayona would soon meet people whose families had sold most of their meager possessions and had bought as much of those drugs as they could. Not enough to get cured, however, only enough to acquire further resistance. (140)

Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious killer worldwide. However, over 95% of TB deaths occur in developing countries (WHO). TB is found to be a curable disease when appropriate medications and treatment are taken. Using the biomedical system is not sufficient to eradicate TB because medical interventions will fail if social determinates aren’t taken into considerations. The biomedical system is a key component in diminishing TB because it allows for diagnosis and control. Social determinants of health play a huge role in shaping one’s health. Three main social determinants that acts as a barrier in curing and preventing TB are income, food insecurity and access to health care.

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

without fear of deportation, he exhorted, "You can come out of the shadows. But they can’t, while the U.S. is experiencing the expansion of health care access with the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This plan excluded about eleven million people who are in the country illegally. Nations with a lower social economic status are being greatly affected by the TB agent and do not have the resources available to people in the United States. According to World Health Organization (WHO): TB is the second greatest killer due to a single infectious agent in other nations, in 2012, 15% of the reported cases of TB resulted in death. TB is the third-leading cause of death for women ages 15-44 in low- and middle-income nations and the hardest hit by this disease are patients with compromised immune systems and elderly patients.

In fact, if tuberculosis is reexamined from the point of view of those living in poverty, a radically different picture emerges” (Farmer, 187). He describes that rates of TB have gone down in the United States and other wealthy countries, and is then, considered a minimal affecting disease. However, recent history shows that TB has been re-introduced and spread back into the wealthier nations especially in their poor communities, but these countries are considering this disease as new and emerging. Farmer states, “If certain populations have long been afflicted by these disorders, why are diseases considered new or emerging? Is it simply because they have come to affect more visible – read, more valuable – persons?”

Often times, people in third world countries face health problems that are not experienced in first and second world countries. Diseases that do not exist in the countries such as the US anymore are still some of the leading problems in poor nations. Professor Susan Craddock from the department of Gender, Woman and Sexuality studies gave a presentation that focused on Tuberculosis, which is falls into a category of diseases called “neglected diseases”. They are called neglected because the development of vaccines and drugs to cure the diseases has decreased to about nothing. The market for these drugs is not lucrative enough for pharmaceutical companies in higher income countries to invest in research. Since the low income countries do not have the resources to carry out research for these drugs the number of neglected disease-related deaths has increased. I found the presentation interesting and enlightening especially because I am interested in the pharmaceutical field. In response to the neglected diseases, different organizations have come together to research and develop vaccines and drugs that can treat these diseases.

Despite the accessibility of inexpensive and successful treatment, tuberculosis still accounts for millions of cases of active disease and deaths worldwide. The disease unreasonably has an effect on the neediest persons in both high-income and developing countries. However, recent improvements in diagnostics, drugs, vaccines and enhanced implementation of present interventions have increased the outlooks for enhanced clinical care and global tuberculosis restriction.

Tuberculosis (TB), which infects one-third of the world population, is a disease with one of the highest mortality rates in the world (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2016a). It is reported that there is an approximately low TB occurrence in nations that have the highest income and middle income; however, there are specific communities such as homeless, poor people and lawbreakers in these countries that have the highest TB incidence (Gärden et al., 2013). Therefore, public health policies about preventing and treating tuberculosis in the marginalized and disfavoured groups have never failed to get social attention. The city of Toronto has been applying Nightingale’s theory of ensuring ventilation and warming, maintaining the cleanliness, and reinforcing the observing of the sick to develop a TB program in order to diminish the spreading and impacts of TB as well as to enhance the support for displaced, disciplinary communities.

Reflecting back upon the debates about reporting tuberculosis and upon the case of Typhoid Mary, the most important lessons we can learn are about the overall impact of disease. While technology has improved our knowledge on diseases, in some ways it has also limited our view of them. We can focus too much on the bacteriology, and not enough on the other social and political factors that affect the entire disease experience. Mary Mallon taught us that there are methods of controlling a disease that do not involve simply containing patients—patients can be integrated into society successfully if they are given the training and instruction to do so. Meanwhile debates regarding the registration of patients with tuberculosis show a developing

“Despite all the ghastliness in the world, human beings are made for goodness, the ones that held in high regard are not militarily powerful nor economically prosperous. They have a commitment to try and make the world a better place” (Desmond Tutu,15)- Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Strong words of hope and faith in humanity come from a man who is regarded in the same heights as Ghandi. Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a survivor of the deadly disease known as, Tuberculosis. According to the CDC, “One third of the world’s population is infected with TB” . A staggering number, but the amount of deaths from TB is even more astonishing, “1.8 million deaths in 2015” (Center for Disease Control). Most people get confused with what exactly tuberculosis even is, whether people say it’s like the flu or bronchitis, but it’s something truly life threatening. Tuberculosis is not exclusive to only one race, ethnicity, or gender, tuberculosis is able to kill anyone regardless of age. Therefore, it is important to raise awareness and educate all the people in the world of the Tuberculosis.

Tuberculosis is among the fatal diseases that are spread through the air. It’s contagious, meaning that it spreads from one infected individual to another, and at times it spreads very fast. In addition to being contagious, the disease is an opportunist infection as it takes advantage of those with weak defense mechanism, and especially the ones with terminal diseases like HIV and AIDS. Tuberculosis is therefore among the major concerns for the World Health Organization due to its contagious nature (World Health Organization 1).

India, the second most populous country with over 1.31 billion people, has the highest burden of tuberculosis (TB) in the world, accounting for 20% of the global incidence of TB, and an even higher share of global incidence of multi–drug resistant (MDR) TB. With an estimated 2 million new cases of TB and 5, 00,000 TB-related deaths in India annually, those who got diagnosed with different forms of DR-TB were 35,385 cases but only 20,753 people started on multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) treatment in 2013. The National Tuberculosis Program was launched in 1962, but suffered heavily continuing TB led mortality. Acknowledging this reality, a Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme (RNTCP) was launched by the Government of India in 1997, however even today it does not comply with World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations.