Waste of Time

What’s so important about TB? Well, Tuberculosis is nothing new. In fact, it has been around for over 5400 years. However, Globalization is changing the face of TB.

Not long ago, this deadly infectious disease appeared to be on the road to recovery. Everything appeared to be solved when the vaccination for TB was discovered and a strong line of drugs were created. The vaccination appeared to be part of the solution to killing TB. BCG is a live vaccine against tuberculosis (TB). BCG stands for Bacillus Calmette-Guerin after two doctors who introduced the vaccine. It was developed in the 1920's and remains the only vaccination available against TB today. However, this vaccine seems to only be slightly preventative and works only about half the time at most.

Similarly, the drug treatment initially seemed to bring more hope. According Dr. Gokhale, at Howard Hughes Medical Institute international research scholar based at the National Institute of Immunology in New Delhi, India, “tuberculosis patients take a cocktail of four drugs, and each inhibits a single enzyme." Treatment for the fortunate in developed countries is no problem. It is a simple treatment.
Globalization changed all of this. All this hope changed when the drugs started appearing in developing countries. Although most doctors brought these drugs over with the good intention of curing many of the infected patients, their plans backfired. There are not enough resources in developing countries to provide and enforce the complete treatment plan. “Patients do not take all their medicines regularly for the required period [partly] because they start to feel better, because doctors and health workers prescribe the wrong treatment regimes, or because the drug supply is unreliable.” As a result, “strains of TB resistant to all major anti-TB drugs have emerged.” According to the WHO, “a particularly dangerous dorm of drug-resistant TB is multidrug-resistant TB (MDR_TB), which is defined as the disease caused by TB bacilli resistant to at least isoniazid and rifampicin, the two most powerful anti-TB drugs. Rates of MDR-TB are high in some countries, especially in the former Soviet Union, and threaten TB control efforts.” MDR-TB is basically incurable.

Because globalization is not only responsible for encouraging development in developing countries, but also the migration from developing countries to developed countries, TB has become even more problematic. Those who are infected with MDR-TB can spread this incurable disease. This means that those who could once have been treated with the traditional drugs can no longer be treated. All they can do is wait to die.

Is there any hope? Despite the efforts of the WHO in their DOTs program, Globalization does not appear to be the solution. It is because of globalization that this disease has gotten out of hand. If a new drug is created that can treat the multi-drug resistant form of TB, who can say that it will not be abused like all of the other TB drugs that are currently on the market? In fact, it could increase the strength of the MDR-TB disease even more.

Stepping back, it is apparent that this idea applies to more than just TB. We as a society are currently functioning as a Band-Aid-Society. This means that as we encounter a particular problem, in this case it happens to be illnesses, we devote all of our attention towards fixing the problem. We develop new drugs. Though it works for the time being, it is not long before the bacteria or virus adapts, and the drugs no longer work. We then start from the beginning again. The only difference is that this time it is even harder to fix. This Band-Aid-Society is a cycle that continues to waste time and money. We can’t keep living like this. At some point in time no invention is going to be able to solve our problems. Then what are we going to do?