Tuberculosis As A Serious Infectious Disease

Tuberculosis has been part of human history for a long time but how long is a long time? Recent research using genetic data has allowed us to know that the tuberculosis progenitor has been on this planet for about 3 million years affecting even our earlier ancestors (Gutierrez et al, 2005). Additionally this research showed that the bacilli from tuberculosis are capable of mixing sections of their genome with other strains and giving the pathogen a composite assembly, which resulted from ancient horizontal exchanges before its clonal expansion. This quality provided tuberculosis a big advantage that even now a days allows the organism to evade, adapt and create resistance to treatments that were once successful. In order to fix current and

The social aspect looks at how TB affects the overall impact of health related quality of life. The global section looks at the barriers of governmental funds and treatment access in different developed versus developing countries. The environmental section explores the environmental conditions in where TB impacts socioeconomic factors, including income, education, housing, age, gender, and geographic distribution. The policy section explores the policy around the treatment of TB, providing distributions of policies (funding, allocative health policies and regulated health policies) and organized policymaking processes at the federal level that allow for the improvement of the health of the population.

Tuberculosis (Mycobacterium tuberculosis), also known as TB, is a disease spread by respiratory inhalation of droplets that contain the bacteria. Tuberculosis is an ancient disease that has been traced back at least 9000 years. In 1882, Dr. Robert Koch was the first physician to describe Mycobacterium tuberculosis as the germ responsible for tuberculosis. However, treatment that was evidenced based was not put into practice until the 20th century. It is estimated that 2 billion people around the world are infected with the TB bacteria. Approximately 5 to 10 percent of these infected people will actual develop active TB and experience the life-threatening symptoms of the disease. Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis, also known as “consumption” was a lethal disease that started spreading rapidly from family to family in parts of New England in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, not much was known about the disease in those times, leading people to start to suspect that vampires were the cause of the deaths. In an effort to protect their families and community, some people resorted to old-folk remedies, rooted from Europe. They exhumed the bodies of deceased relatives who died of consumption and checked to see if they had “fresh,” circulating, liquid blood in their hearts, which would indicate that the deceased had become a vampire. They believed that one of the relatives was not completely dead and was “draining” the life of his living relatives by stealing their blood and essentially placing it in his own corpse’s heart. In order to stop further spread of the disease, once it is discovered which of the deceased had become a vampire, the corpse’s vital organs such as his heart and lungs are removed and burned to ashes. Burning the heart to ashes fastens the drying of the fresh, liquid blood, which kills the vampire for good in the process. Additionally, many believed that consuming the vampire’s burned ashes acts as a cure for the living relatives that are infected with consumption (Bell 124-140).

Tuberculosis (TB) is a chronic bacterial infection that affects millions of people globally. It is a contagious disease that is spread through the air, and it usually affects the lungs. It is transmitted from person to person through droplets from the respiratory tract of those who are already infected with the disease. Some who are infected with the bacteria that causes TB often exhibit no symptoms, because their immune systems stop the bacteria from growing and multiplying. Those with compromised immune systems are more susceptible to developing the full blown disease which can cause symptoms that include coughing, spitting blood, chest pains, weakness, weight loss, and fever. Tuberculosis can be treated with a six to nine month course of a combination of antibiotics. If left untreated, TB will spread and can be fatal.

For many people in the U.S. tuberculosis represents a disease process that one rarely sees. For this reason the reality of tuberculosis outside of the U.S. can easily be lost. CDC statistics report that approximately one third of the world 's population is infected with tuberculosis.1 This can be a sobering statistic for an individual wholly removed from the idea that tuberculosis, abbreviated TB, remains a prominent disease process throughout much of the world. The objective will be to provide not just an informative description of the disease, it 's etiology, clinical manifestations, treatments, and prognosis, but also to provide a reminder that tuberculosis retains a significant presence in the world despite the early

Tuberculosis (TB) is an airborne infectious disease generally caused by the bacterium called Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) [1]. The United States’ number and rate of new tuberculosis cases has kept declining since the TB reemergence in 1992, however, there is a slight increase in the number and the rate of new TB cases, 1.7% and 0.9%, respectively, in 2015 with a total of 9,563 new cases and a rate of 3.0 cases per 100,000 population compares to 2014 [2].

Typically, when one hears of the word “war,” their minds may drift to the World Wars I and II, the Vietnam War, Korea War, or the Persian Gulf War. However, not many think of the war that the human immune system is engaged in, right now--at this very instant inside the anatomy. Daily, the body’s immune system fights pathogens, bacteria, and other foreign substances. Yet there are times when our immune system fails—be it genetics, age, or health. When this occurs, the immune system is compromised, thus allowing pathogens and other foreign substances to overpower the body’s line of defense and begin to infect the body.

Tuberculosis, a disease responsible for millions of deaths and has been affecting people since Aristotle’s and Hippocrates’s eras to the present day (Frith, 2014a). Tuberculosis has surged in great epidemics and then receded, Mycobacterium tuberculosis may have killed more persons than any other microbial pathogen (Frith, 2014a). Tuberculosis is an infection by the “bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis which invades the lungs” (Saladin, 2015) and other parts of the body. Tuberculosis is a contagious disease and when left untreated it is fatal (Kalo et al., 2015). “Although [tuberculosis] is a preventable and treatable disease…it still poses a significant threat globally” due to drug resistant strains of the disease (Kalo et al., 2015). Millions of people have contracted Tuberculosis, many now suffering from the drug resistant Tuberculosis, and millions have died from this disease (Kalo et al, 2015).

Tuberculosis is the one of the world’s second deadliest disease; having killed around 1.5 million people in the year 2013, second only to HIV/AIDS. Around 3 million cases, which equates to one-third of the global total, go undiagnosed and hundreds more cases are considered to be a drug-resistant form of the disease. A search done on the New York Times’ website turns up 10 articles with the word “tuberculosis” in the headline published over the past 12 months while “HIV and AIDS” turns up 91 articles (Gould, 2015). The sad reality is that tuberculosis is not given enough attention compared to other well-known diseases such as HIV/AIDS. Tuberculosis is considered a disease of the past and not an immediate threat to developed nations; not to mention that it is just not profitable route for the health care industry to pursue. Although, when processing all this information, we tend to forget that HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis go hand-in-hand, as tuberculosis is an opportunistic disease for AIDS patients in sub-Saharan Africa and workers/patients in medical and correctional facilities.

Even though the idea of tuberculosis being hereditarily was present, tuberculosis was still agreed to be an infectious disease at this time. Tuberculosis, as many other bacterial infections, needs a host. The bacterium is not found outside of the animal’s body. The main way that tuberculosis, and many other bacteria-caused diseases spread is through sputum. It is estimated that “a fairly well advanced consumptive spits out from one and a half to four and a third billion bacilli in twenty-four hours” (Kelbs 32). Basically, if the person is infected with tuberculosis, and does not take proper precautions, that person is endangering everyone they come in contact with. It is estimated that “a consumptive infects only a small area about him – 30 to 50 cubic meters” (Kelbs 32). When a person is coughing and, sneezing, or even talking, that person is ejecting dried up and pulverized sputum, which can be easily carried like dust through the currents of air to be inhaled or swallowed. While the most obvious way of spread is through expelling the bacterium into the air, the culture of the early 20th century also fueled the spread. Handkerchiefs were very popular at the time. Through this popular fashion of the time, “sputum is also disseminated through the habit of spitting into handkerchiefs, which soil the pocket into which they are placed” (Kelbs 32). After the handkerchief is placed back into is place, the sputum is then dried and pulverized, ready to be spread. Any hand that has

It was thought to be largely eradicated, but since the late 1980s it has been making a steady comeback. Today, throughout the world, we have three to five million people dying from tuberculosis every year, because the disease is so easily transmitted from the germs of infected people. (Dubos: Pg. 102) Unlike many other infectious diseases, Tuberculosis can be spread through the air. Health care workers and others can become infected even without any direct contact with a carrier of Tuberculosis. Compounding the problem, there are some new strains of Tuberculosis that has resistant to the drugs previously used to combat this disease. Because of the new strings of untreatable forms of Tuberculosis, precautions are taken by EMTs personnel to protect themselves from any person with a cough living in certain locations, such as shelters for the homeless or prisoner. These people have a high possibility of having or carrying the disease of Tuberculosis. Like AIDS, it was once considered a social disease and referred to as the “White Plague” or “Potts Disease”. (Straus: Pg. 142) It is

Tuberculosis (TB) is a contagious bacterial infection that affects the lungs. Mycobacterium Tuberculosis is the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. Before the 19th century the frequency of TB was relatively unknown its incidence is thought to have peaked between the end of the 18th century and the end of the 19th century.

What is Tuberculosis? Tuberculosis, TB for short, is an ancient disease that has been around even before the first recorded disease in the history. This disease can be found in Egyptian mummies from 4000 BC. Tuberculosis is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, or tubercle bacillus ("Centers for disease," 2011). Tuberculosis is primarily a disease of the lungs, but the TB bacterium can also travel through blood stream and attack any part of the body like kidney, spine and brain (Hamann, 1994). According to CDC, tuberculosis is considered one of the world’s deadliest diseases; 1/3 of the world’s population suffers from TB infection, in 2010, there were nearly nine million people that became sick with TB around the world, and TB is the

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).