A Worldwide Pandemic

I’ve touched on the ethics behind TB and described various case studies regarding TB, however, I have not gone into much detail about TB itself. Now seems like the perfect time to do so.

According to the World Health Organization, also called the WHO, “Tuberculosis, or TB, is an infectious bacterial disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which most commonly affects the lungs. It is transmitted from person to person via droplets from the throat and lungs of people with the active respiratory disease.” At the beginning of 2007, approximately 2 billion people, especially in Asia, were infected with the TB bacilli, which is the microbes that cause TB. That consisted about 1/3 of the world’s population. One out of every ten of those people infected in the TB bacilli will become sick with the active form of the virus. The patients who do not receive treatment generally infect approximately ten to fifteen people per year. Those who have HIV are at an even higher risk of contracting this infectious disease. Even scarier, in 2005, 1.6 million people died from TB. This is approximately 4400 deaths per day. Undeniably, Tuberculosis is a worldwide pandemic.

What’s next? Scientists are working hard to develop a cure. However, according to the WHO, “Multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB) is a form of TB that does not respond to the standard treatments using first-line drugs. MDR-TB is present in virtually all countries recently surveyed by WHO and its partners.” Despite this discouraging fact, the WHO continues to work towards meeting its goal of reducing the prevalence of and deaths due to TB by half by 2015. In order to fight this, these leaders are following a plan called The Global Plan to Stop TB. “The strategy emphasizes the need for proper health systems and the importance of effective primary health care to address the TB epidemic.”