Saturday 1 October 2011

Tuberculosis - The Lung Attacker





Tuberculosis - The Lung Attacker
(Latin tuber cuius, little bump). Infectious disease of world-wide incidence. As a disease of the lung it was known to the physicians of ancient Greece as a wasting disease; hence its other name, phthisis. The cause is a micro-organism called the tubercle bacillus, or the bacillus of Koch, the physician who discovered it. There are three known types of bacilli - human, bovine, and avian. The first two attack the human race, the human type producing infection by inhalation, the bovine by ingestion of the milk of tuberculous cows. Efficient pasteurisation, and proper handling, of milk protect man from bovine tuberculosis. The bovine bacillus can cause widespread disease in animals, especially cows and pigs.
No child is born with tuberculosis, the disease is the result of direct infection. It affects glands, bones, joints, and the genito-urinary system (bladder, testicle, and kidney), when it is often referred to as surgical tuberculosis. When present in the lungs it is called pulmonary tuberculosis. These forms of disease may be intercurrent, or one can result from the other, while both can lead to tuberculous meningitis.
Whatever be its route of entry to the body, the tubercle bacillus can always reach the lungs. Usually this takes place in childhood from minimal infection. It commonly produces but little clinical effect, leaving only a small hard nodule, called a Ghon's focus, in the lung substance, and calcified glands at the root of the lung. Occasionally the child develops vague symptoms of malaise and fever during the time it is over-coming this primary infection; this illness may last several months, but in the vast majority of cases the children recover completely. But if the child's resistance is poor, or it gets repeated infections, which do not allow it to develop immunity, it gets blood-borne extension (miliary tuberculosis), or a spread of infection through the air passages (pneumonic or broncho pneumonic tuberculosis). Such forms, formerly usually fatal, can nearly always be successfully treated with anti-tuberculous drugs.

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