Artifact #7
Tuberculosis gets its name from the “tubercles” that from on the lymph nodes in humans and animals. In March of 1882, Dr. Robert Koch announced that he had finally isolated the bacteria that caused tuberculosis, otherwise known as TB. Before Dr. Koch discovered the bacteria, it was thought that TB was hereditary, and that the person who died from TB would come back as a vampire. At the time, TB killed one out of every seven people in the United States and Europe. TB has been around for an estimated three million years, and throughout the ages, the disease has been nicknamed many times over. In ancient Rome it was called tabes, in the 1700s “the white plague”, and in the 1800s “the consumption,” just to name a few. TB has been traced in humans remains that dated back to 9,000 years ago, and written records to over 3,000 years ago. In the Europe, for a 200-year span, it was estimated that TB was accounted for 25% of the of all deaths. TB is spread through the air and cannot be spread through food or water. A form of TB, called Bovine Tuberculosis can spread among mammals and also be passed to humans either via infected droplets from coughing or ingesting infected milk from a cow. This disease can still be found mainly in Africa, but also in parts of Asia and the Americas. According to unitednationfoundation.org, TB is right the now the world’s leading infectious disease, and kills someone every 18 seconds, with ten million people a year contracting the disease. In the 1940s, doctors first came up with a microbial treatment for TB, and though this helped cure some cases, it also led to drug resistant TB. In the 1960s, better and more effective medications were made, and this led to a decrease in TB infection rates, which led to health agencies not making the disease as much as a priority. Fast forward 30 years to the 90s, more medications and poor usage, caused for painful side and permanent side effects. Between 2005 and 2015 an estimated 49 million people were successfully treated for TB, but at the same time, a global spread of mutli-drug resistant TB was seen. Recently, another form of TB has been observed, known as XDR TB, or extensively-drug resistant TB. This left for fewer options for treating TB, and those that were available were expensive. This new strain also gave patients more complications and a higher rate of death. The average cost to treat a drug susceptible TB, is around $17,000 while the XDR TB can cost $554,000. The XDR TB has a mortality rate of 9%, with a large number of patients that experience side effects. Since 1993 until 2018, in the U.S., the number of cases has gone down from 25,000 cases in one year to around 15,000 in 2018. Of those cases reported in 2018, 70% of those were said to foreign born people. The deaths contributing to TB have also gone down during that time as well. The number of drug resistant cases have remained consistent though over the last 20 years.
Works cited
https://www.cdc.gov/tb/worldtbday/history.htm
https://www.oie.int/fileadmin/Home/eng/Media_Center/docs/pdf/Disease_cards/BOVINE-TB-EN.pdf
https://unfoundation.org/blog/post/tuberculosis-then-now/
https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/2014/world-tb-day.html
https://www.cdc.gov/tb/publications/factsheets/statistics/tbtrends.htm