Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis (TB) was found in body remains in Egyptian mummies and in pre-Columbian human remains in South America 14. Hippocrates described the disease as a pulmonary infection in 500 BC. TB is an airborne disease caused by mycobacterium. Due to poor hygienic and social conditions tuberculosis spread rapidly among humans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe. During this time people were living extremely close together making it easy to spread TB from coughing. Transmission was also said to be caused when people spit from using various tobacco products or through sharing a common drinking cup 15.
Since it is an airborne disease, TB is easily spread to another human's respiratory system (lungs) where it either stays or travels further to the nervous system or bone. Incidentally, a person can be infected and remain asymptomatic for life, whereas, another may progressively waste away losing a considerable amount of weight in addition to suffering other side effects. People may even cough up blood from their infected lungs and one's bone marrow may fail to produce replacement red blood cells. The treatment plan for TB in the nineteenth and twentieth century's was for people to live in isolation. While in isolation patients were treated by receiving nutritious meals, exercise and sleeping outdoors. However during the Civil War isolation was impossible due to the wartime environment. Not to mention, the symptoms of TB, coughing, a fever, weight loss, and night sweats could have been symptoms of other diseases. Normally when a soldier was initially infected the symptoms eventually went away. However when they came back they were worse and since they were not treated properly initially that is why the death rate for soldiers continued to be high. Even though patients had alternate living environments they still had to worry about physical defects. At times people had to endure a lot to prohibit either or both lungs from collapsing by pumping air into the diaphragms. Then in 1956 a combination of drugs were found to be successful in treating TB resulting in closing the isolation environments and patients were instead treated on an outpatient basis.
Prior to finding a treatment, the Nobel Prize was given in 1905 for research on identification of the TB infection. This experiment became the basis for the skin test that is used today. A small amount of Purified Protein Derivative (PPD) from the virus is injected into the skin of one's forearm. Then within 48 hours if one is infected, the skin will be raised at the surface of the injection site.
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