The Tuberculosis Comeback

19 Pages 4727 Words

uberculosis from which people die, and the other form is called tuberculosis infection. The infection is a latent, non-contagious and a symptomatic presence of TB, whereby only a small percentage of people with the infection will progress into having the active form of TB.
The epidemics of TB in the early 1900’s eventually settled down upon discovery of antibiotics. As time progressed many implemented programs and monies to prevent and treat the disease shrank. With the help of penicillin, people were becoming healthy again and the disease was no longer ravaging the American population and economy. In the US between 1953 and 1984 the number of active TB cases had dropped 74% (U.S. Congress, 3). People felt this was a disease that technology and drugs had muzzled their way out of, but despite the trends at the time they were wrong. Tuberculosis was never eliminated in third world developing nations, and officials had thought the disease would wean as it was weaning in the US; instead the only thing that was weaning was funding for this disease. Today TB is back and it is killing three million people every year while one third of the world’s population is infected.
AIDS and TB; A Synergistic Effect:
By 1985 TB cases began to climb again. This time, instead of the disease killing all types of individuals, this new epidemic seems to affect certain portions of populations. Areas that are highly populated, have large amounts of ethnic minorities, people who travel extensively, those with HIV and those not born in the US are at higher risk to TB today.
In the 1980’s AIDS became a huge epidemic in and outside the United States. Together AIDS and TB have a synergistic effect, whereby the effects of both illnesses taken together are extremely higher than the effects of independently having one of the diseases. As AIDS progresses it ravages the immune system, leaving patients vulnerable to many bacteria despite desperate measures ...