Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis General Information

Tuberculosis is a very difficult medical condition to deal with. Not only people who suffer from this disease, but also the healthy ones should be informed about all the aspects concerning this infection. Without a proper treatment applied in time, the illness is fatal; it is well known that this medical disorder has plagued mankind for millennia. If you do not know much about it, we strongly advise you to contact your health care provider or any specialist in the domain. Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease caused by a bacterium that attacks mainly the lungs, although it can also occur in other parts of the body. The germ spreads very quickly, through airborne droplets, when an infected person just coughs, talks or sneezes.

More prone to develop this type of medical condition are those people who have a damaged immune system, such as persons who live with AIDS or HIV, are pregnant, have done organ transplant etc. This type of disorder is considered life-threatening because every year, more than two million people from all around the world die because of Tuberculosis. People should also know that this is one of the most common diseases (one-third of the human population get infected with the bacterium causing TB and one new person is infected every minute). In our times, although the science has evolved so much and the treatment options have advanced, TB is considered a global pandemic, “helped” by poverty, immune disorders, lack of medical services etc.

Tuberculosis Symptoms

It is highly important for every person to be aware of the signs and symptoms caused by Tuberculosis. As soon as you start experiencing any of them, you should call your doctor and ask for medical attention. In the first stages, people deal with latent TB, meaning that the infection is asymptomatic and is not contagious. As it advances, specialists call it active TB because it makes patients very sick and can be very easily spread. Although active, the disease can be asymptomatic for years, even though it causes important damage to the patient’s organism.

We will enumerate some of the main specific signs and symptoms caused by this infectious disorder (in the case that the lungs are affected): bad and intense cough that can last for more than 20 days, night sweats, unintended weight loss, fatigue, high fever (over 40oC), loss of appetite, coughing up mucus or even blood, chills, pleurisy (pain felt during coughing) etc. Tuberculosis can spread to various parts of the body, for example bones, bone marrow, muscles, lymphatic system, CNS (central nervous system), joints and urinary tract. When the infection is outside the lungs, the main signs and symptoms depend on what organ is damaged. If the kidneys are involved, then you will observe blood in your urine, and if the spine is damaged, you may feel annoying back pain. In some more serious cases, Tuberculosis can appear simultaneously in different systems of the organism. Untreated this infectious disease causes complications, affecting the meninges or it can recur.

Tuberculosis Treatment

Many diseases, if are discovered in time and treated properly, have a good prognosis and high expectations. We strongly advise you to contact your health care provider or any specialist as soon as you start experiencing one or more of the signs and symptoms that we have listed before and are specific for Tuberculosis. It is important to seek medical guidance at the right time, before the disease progresses to a complicated stage. You must not take medications before consulting a doctor. The symptoms of TB are common and can characterize other medical problems. If you accuse persistent cough, sweats during the night or sudden unexplained weight loss immediately call your doctor. He or she can do several tests in order to differentiate the causes of your symptoms. If you do not have a personal doctor, you can go to a local public health department for help. You should also contact a specialist in infectious diseases or a pulmonologist (doctor specialized in lung diseases).

In the first stages of development Tuberculosis is an asymptomatic disorder, experts recommend you to do some TB tests if you have AIDS or HIV, if you work in nursing homes, prison or in other residential facility and if you have close contact with persons suffering from contagious TB. There are two methods to detect if someone has Tuberculosis, but specialists consider that the Mantoux test is the most accurate. This is a simple skin test that consists in injecting a substance, PPD tuberculin within the inside forearm skin. After two or three days the doctor will check your arm to see the reactions. If the result is positive, then a hard raised bump will appear at the injection site. Then, other several tests must be done to determine the stage of the disease.

The most common two tests include culture tests (of the stomach secretions and of your mucus that comes up when you cough, called sputum) and X-rays of the chest area. A normal treatment for Tuberculosis is lengthy because only after six months to one year of antibiotics the bacterium is completely eliminated. The exact period of treatment and the exact antibiotics depend on the age, results of susceptibility test and overall health status of the patients. If the disease is not active, health care providers will prescribe preventive drugs to destroy the bacterium that may activate. The main drug of choice is INH (Isoniazid), administrated for six to nine months. A long-term treatment causes severe side effects, as well as the use of certain medicines, for example Tylenol. For patients suffering from active Tuberculosis, the treatment option is based on four drugs: Pyrazinamide, Rifampin (prescribed as Rimactane or Rifadin), Isoniazid and Ethambutol (prescribed as Myambutol). You should not stop the treatment on your own and you should also avoid taking more doses than recommended because drug resistance can occur and it is more difficult to treat. If the bacterium will develop resistance to any of these drugs, the respective medicine will be stopped.