The Comeback Of TB

HOW THE OLD THREAT CAME BACK AS A NEW THREAT:

In the early 1900’s and throughout the industrial revolution, the number one leading cause of dea

Health officials have a perplexing dilemma on their hands. There aren’t any new antibiotics currently on the drawing board to be released anytime soon and there hasn’t been any additional development in this area for the past 25 years. Mainly this is because the efforts to make stronger antibiotics for TB had gone by the wayside in the past few decades because many companies felt that the need for these drugs wasn’t going to become a health issue. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) admits that they let their guard down too soon. Despite this, since the 1980’s two to three million people in the world have been dying of TB each year. Each infected person transmits the disease to 15-20 people per year. Now that TB is a health issue, will technology bail us out in time? Will the right drugs emerge for us, or will other routes need to be taken? What will those other routes be? This re-emerging disease is once again consuming people and the rates of active TB continue to soar. Tuberculosis now kills “more than any other infectious disease except AIDS” (Roberts, 50).

WHO prefers to initially treat with monitored combinations of first-line drugs, but that is no longer effective in Russia. In many cases it also increases the drug resistant problem. Not only are the rates of alcohol and substance abuse increasing in Russia, but also is prostitution. The synergistic effects of Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STD) and AIDS are another problem that adds fuel to the fire. Those who are HIV positive and also have syphilis will have a very difficult time fighting TB, much more difficult than if they had one of the latter instead of both. In Russia, HIV mainly occurs in those who are drug users, and 30% of those drug users have TB. For the prostitutes in Russia, more than half of them are HIV positive. The data between 1997 and 2000 show a decrease in syphilis of about 30% but most likely there is another variable because the situation is far from moving towards improvement (Zuger, F9). It has been suggested that the reasoning behind the decrease is due to the large amount of publicity with regards to the problems, and that the stigma drives people into hiding.

The author’s hypothetical data to this study design will show the following. The patients near the prison will have a higher rate of being previously hospitalized than the patients not near the prison. They will also have a higher rate of incarceration because those who are near prison systems possibly develop greater immunity to drugs than those not near the prison system. Alcohol use in patients near the prison will be slightly higher but most likely nothing extraordinary that may lead to other things. Patients near the prison will have a significantly lower cure rate than their counterparts, and therefore will suffer a higher mortality rate than the other population as well. In both populations those who are smokers will be more likely to be a MDR-TB patient, possibly due to their pulmonary system already being weakened by tobacco use. Along with considering smoking as a risk to TB, comes the additional confounding factor that it is possible that tests may make it look like TB is the health problem in a patient, when really the underlying cause of the health problem is lung cancer. Because of this, both groups will have been tested by use of sputum smears to verify drug sensitive or MDR-TB, to attempt to eliminate this chance from the start.

As far as the American general public is concerned, most don’t realize how much of a burden the comeback of Tuberculosis is becoming. Most are caught up in the Middle-East situation and terrorism; they think that TB is a disease of the poor and third world society of which they won’t have to face themselves. President Bush seems not to have made it much of an interest of his as well. His interests are present with general concern to the issue, but not necessarily of enough concern when it comes to putting budget money

Some topics in this essay:
MDR TB, RESEARCH DESIGN, FINDINGS CONCLUSION, AIDS TB, COSTLY TB, Agency CIA, Soviet Union, Robert Koch, Penitentiary Hospital, BREAKING CODE, near prison, drug sensitive, cohort study, patients near prison, aids tb, prison population, drug resistant, hiv positive, first-line drugs, research design, health officials, population near prison, multi-drug resistant mdr, economic crisis political, crisis political turmoil,