Medical Care

Tuberculosis

Introduction:
It is a common and in some cases deadly infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis in humans.uberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body. It is spread through the air when people who have active MTB infection cough, sneeze, or spit.
Causes:
The cause of TB, Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB), is a small aerobic non-motile bacillus. High lipid content of this pathogen accounts for many of its unique clinical characteristics.
Symptoms:
Symptoms include chest pain, coughing up blood, and a productive, prolonged cough for more than three weeks. Systemic symptoms include fever, chills, night sweats, appetite loss, weight loss, pallor, and fatigue.
Tuberculosis also has a specific odour attached to it, this has led to trained animals being used to vet samples as a method of early detection.
In the other 25% of active cases, the infection moves from the lungs, causing other kinds of TB, collectively denoted extrapulmonary tuberculosis.
Treatment:
Treatment for TB uses antibiotics to kill the bacteria. Effective TB treatment is difficult, due to the unusual structure and chemical composition of the mycobacterial cell wall, which makes many antibiotics ineffective and hinders the entry of drugs.The two antibiotics most commonly used are isoniazid and rifampicin. However, instead of the short course of antibiotics typically used to cure other bacterial infections, TB requires much longer periods of treatment (around 6 to 24 months) to entirely eliminate mycobacteria from the body.Latent TB treatment usually uses a single antibiotic, while active TB disease is best treated with combinations of several antibiotics, to reduce the risk of the bacteria developing antibiotic resistance

Vaccines:

Many countries use Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine as part of their TB control programmes, especially for infants. According to the WHO, this is the most often used vaccine worldwide, with 85% of infants in 172 countries immunized in 1993.[ One country that notably does not widely administer BCG is the United States, where TB is rather uncommon. BCG was the first vaccine for TB. From 1905, Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin worked at the Institut Pasteur de Lille and the Pasteur Institute in France developing BCG, administering the first human trials in 1921. However, deaths due to flawed manufacturing processes created public resistance to BCG, delaying mass vaccinations until after World War II. The protective efficacy of BCG for preventing serious forms of TB (e.g. meningitis) in children is greater than 80%; its protective efficacy for preventing pulmonary TB in adolescents and adults is variable, ranging from 0 to 80%.