Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis

Introduction

Tuberculosis (TB) is a bacterial disease that most commonly affects the lungs (pulmonary TB). In otherwise healthy individuals, most infections are latent and therefore asymptomatic. About 10% of people infected with TB will develop active disease immediately and an additional 10% are likely to develop active TB from latent infection over the course of their lifetime. In immunocompromised patients, such as those with HIV, active TB is extremely common (Packard, 2009).

Background

Tuberculosis (TB) is known from remote antiquity & uumledad, and is supposed to be as old as man himself. Their clinical characteristics and transmissibility met since before 1000 BC. The doctors called it antique & uumledad consumption, Hippocrates (460-370 BC) in his statements and refers to tuberculosis and the notion that she had was so accurate that in describing it says: "The vomiting of blood following the consumption".

The word tuberculosis was first used in 1834, when even the diagnosis of disease was based on your symptoms. In 1865 Villemin showed their infectivity by experiments in animals inoculated with material obtained from patients known. The discovery of the bacillus tuberculosis producer in 1882 by German scientist Robert Koch, provided compelling evidence that this organism was the sole cause of the disease and could be demonstrated by examining the sputum in tuberculosis patients (Katherine, 2006).

In 1993, WHO declared a global emergency state of pulmonary tuberculosis, but while scientists have made ??every effort, the terrible situation born of scarcity of financial resources, poor prioritization or total lack of programs, the emergence of resistant strains and the increase of HIV infection has run its course. Today when many had forgotten the most variegated and rare pictures of it, whip the man again, so is considered a reemerging disease, often linked to AIDS.

Although it is an endemic disease worldwide, the level of involvement of different countries is extremely different. The curves can be expressed graphically key epidemiological indices are rising from low rates for industrial and developing nations, to the places where they reach the highest levels, ie in developing countries (Raviglione, 2005).

Although tuberculosis can be located pulmonary and extrapulmonary disease, the first is the most frequent and most important from the epidemiological point of view, it is responsible for transmission in the community, through the patients with positive sputum on direct examination.

Global prevalence of Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis was the "captain of all the men of death" during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As evidenced by the bone lesions showing signs of tuberculosis discovered in 3000-year-old Egyptian mummies, tuberculosis has existed for millennia. By the middle of the seventeenth century, it became known as the White Plague in Europe. Both in England and Eastern cities of the United States, the mortality rates of the disease reached their peak at the end of the eighteenth century and during the first half of the nineteenth century, accounting for about 25% of all deaths. The dramatic increase of tuberculosis occurred during the early years of the Industrial Revolution since the prevailing phenomena of overcrowding, poor sanitation, poor nutrition, lack of ...