Historical:
Tuberculosis (TB) in the past has been a consumptive plague that has taken many lives. Though TB has consumed not only the lives of people it has also taken people “life” away. By life I mean their ability to complete simple tasks, to be around family or even to eat the food they want. The people who were and are not treated correctly for TB and lived didn’t really live because it was a life of struggle and constant pain. In the 19thcentury TB had killed one in seven people that lived. The disease ran rampant and then in 1882 a doctor by the name Robert Koch discovered that the treatments for TB had been targeting all the wrong areas. He found out that TB was not genetic, but highly contagious and could be prevented through good hygiene and quarantine. To help cure the U.S. then launched a large scale education plan that worked to let the public know about the disease and how it spreads and the basic ways of preventing it. Good hygiene only worked so well although because also in the 19thcentury many immigrants and underprivileged lived in cramped spaces that allowed the disease to spread more. The way the U.S. aimed to combat this was to tell patients with TB and their close relatives to get out of the tenements and to get fresh air as much as possible. This was to prevent the up close and personal contact with people who were infected. Another factor that didn’t help the spread of TB was the malnutrition that these immigrants were facing because of the poor wages they were being paid while working in the factories. Although TB ran its course much worse in the underprivileged in the U.S. it also attacked the wealthy, but the wealthy were able to combat it faster and with better treatments than the poor. TB is a disease that is very dangerous, deadly and only got worse with the introduction of HIV in the early 20thcentury.[1]
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Contemporary:
TB today is a much different disease than TB in the 19thcentury. Today we are facing strains of TB that are drug resistant, multi-drug resistant and extremely drug resistant. This idea that we’ve worked so hard to find a cure for TB and now it’s just losing its effectiveness is terrifying. Although it is only us as humans fault that these types of TB have emerged and the fault of HIV that makes patients more susceptible. The reason it is our fault as humans that any form of drug resistant TB has arised is because not all, but some of the patients who have TB will go in for treatment and take the antibiotics that can cure TB, but they then stop the treatment before it is done and the TB almost gets antibodies for the antibiotics and can fight it off the next time it sees it. This is bad because it also causes the genome of the virus to change into MDR and XDR TB which then is spread because of the poor living conditions of the people with this disease. The way HIV has played a role in making TB more dangerous is that HIV degrades the immune system making TB able to attack stronger and get less of a fight from the body and this has led to be the single most important factor of TB spreading in Africa since the late 20thcentury.[2]After research and watching the video on TB I believe that the only way to combat TB is for world super powers like the U.S., Canada, China and Russia to put a bunch of resources and money into finding a vaccine that could prevent TB from even infecting people and eventually find a cure for the people that are infected currently. Without the support from the world super powers I don’t think that TB will ever be fully prevented.
[1]https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/plague-gallery/
[2]https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10551019
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