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Tuberculosis - A Global Disease Beyond Just the Tropics

While tuberculosis is not classified as a typical tropical disease, it is just as serious as one. Tuberculosis aka TB affects the lungs and can be life-threatening, killing several million people around the world each year. It is estimate that a whopping 33% of the world's population is infected with tuberculosis, although many of them may have a form that is not active or contagious.

Tuberculosis is a pandemic affecting the entire planet and poverty, resistant bacteria, HIV and AIDS growth and even lack of health care all contribute to the problem. This disease is spread through the prolonged exposure of an infected person, usually through coughing or sneezing which releases contaminated droplets. Signs of this potentially fatal disease may lay dormant for years until such time as some event triggers it into active infection status.

Causes of Tuberculosis

This lung disease is caused by mycobacterium tuberculosis and is spread mainly through close personal contact in which saliva is often shared. That is why casual contact typically does not cause the disease; therefore you are in the most danger from close friends and family members. There is non-resistant active tuberculosis as well as active tuberculosis. The non-resistant form can be effectively "cured" with proper treatment protocols.

TB is on the rise, particularly in regions such as Southeast Asia and Africa where HIV and AIDS is common. In fact, AIDS and HIV sufferers are very susceptible to tuberculosis and many actually die from that global killer than the AIDS virus itself. Other factors have also been pinpointed as contributing factors to TB such as: crowding living areas, increased poverty and lack of medical care, foreign born people bringing it into the United States and TB bacteria that are resistant to medications.

Symptoms and Treatment

While a TB infection itself may show no symptoms, the active form does. You can expect weight loss, long cough which produces sputum with blood, low fever, fatigue, chills, night sweats, loss of appetite and pain upon breathing. Tuberculosis is not just a global lung disease. It can also strike other parts of the body like the central nervous system, joints, urinary tract, bone marrow, joints, lymphatic system and even the muscles.

Treatment is based on each person's tuberculosis and its severity. Typically, an antibiotic treatment can last up to a year as it takes some powerful drugs to kill those bacteria. Other factors to consider include overall health, age and determination of active TB or just a tuberculosis infection. If you have the TB infection, drug treatment may last up to 9 months. However, with active TB, a drug cocktail with several medications may be taken for several months before testing to see how much of the disease was eradicated by pharmaceuticals.

Prevention of TB

While there are drug treatments, it pays to follow some preventative measures to avoid the disease altogether. For instance, you must keep your body and immune system totally healthy so that is will have the strength to fight off an infection. Exercise, a good diet and sleep are several motivating factors. If you work in a prison or health care facility where there is an increased risk of exposure, it is important that you are tested for tuberculosis to ensure that you do not have it.

All in all, tuberculosis can be a totally preventative disease. Found globally, each person on the planet would have to do their part in avoiding all of the risk factors of the disease.