Tuberculosis has existed since 2000 BC. There has been evidence of tubercles in mummified Egyptian mummies dating around 2400 BC with clear symptoms of the disease. The Greeks were the people to give the disease it’s name tuberculosis which means small lumps. The major epidemics of tuberculosis were in the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth century, which mainly affected the Untied States and Europe. Little was known about how to fight or cure tuberculosis and there was also little research done on tuberculosis.
It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that great strives was made in helping find a cure for tuberculosis. In 1882 Robert Koch discovered a staining technique that eventually let him see the bacteria mycobacterium tuberculosis. An American physician Edward Trudeus built the first American sanatorium, because of his experiences with tuberculosis. By 1930 the United States had 600 sanatoriums with a total of 84,000 beds. Bacteriologists Albert Calmette and Camille Guerin worked with a violent strain of tuberculosis at the Pasteur Institute. In 1924 they developed a vaccination called BCG. They first administered the BCG vaccine to a young boy who was at a very high risk of developing Tuberculosis. The vaccine was successful and the newborn never developed the disease.
Then in 1944 microbiologist Selman Waksman isolated an anti tuberculosis antibiotic, antinomyein but was too toxic for humans or animals to use. In 1943 Waksman discovered streptomycin a substance from streptomyes griseus that killed the bacteria mycobacterium tuberculosis, being the modern era of antibiotic therapy. With the use of antibiotics, tuberculosis decreased through out the world for the next thirty years. Mortality rates dropped sharply. In the United States tuberculosis dropped from 188 per 100,000 people in 1980 to about 1 per 100,000 people in 1980. The new cure for Tuberculosis was working so well that medical experts expected that tuberculosis would be completely eliminated by the year 2010.
Unfortunately by 1985 tuberculosis began to get out of control in most underdeveloped countries and even in the United States where it increased by 20 percent. One reason for the increase of tuberculosis was HIV. People how became infected with HIV have their immune systems weakened by the disease which greatly increase the risk of getting tuberculosis. The increase of tuberculosis was the highest in African and Asia, where HIV infects the highest number of people in the world. Another reason for the increase of tuberculosis was the failure of patients to complete their whole proscribed medicine.
Most people take the medicine until the felt better unaware that they have to take the whole dose of medicine to fully get rid of the disease. Also that by not fully finishing their medicine the disease had became resistant to some of the medicines. Both of my articles that I used for this paper were very well written out they explained every thing and had bold face captions for things that were really important. I think that the articles did a good job in getting their point across especially about the mutation of tuberculosis and it’s resistance against medicine. I think that it’s us as the patient’s fault for not fully taking our medicine, but I think it’s also the doctors fault to because they never tell me that I have to take the whole perception or else the disease will became resistant to it next time.
Bibliography
- http//www.state.nj.us/health/cd/tbhistry.com, A History of Tuberculosis
- http//www.content.health.msn.com, Tuberculosis Science Essays.
