SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – As the height of the COVID-19 pandemic fades into our memories, a new disease has surpassed it as the world’s top killer. Actually, it might be more accurate to say an old disease has returned to the top spot.
For more, stream KCBS Radio now .
“TB is the world’s deadliest infectious disease, briefly eclipsed by COVID-19,” Lisa George, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control, recently told the Atlanta Journal Constitution . “However, TB has reclaimed this top position as the pandemic has subsided.”
TB is the shortened name for tuberculosis, caused by a bacterium called Mycobacterium tuberculosis . This bacterium’s history may go back as far as 3 million years and its history of infecting humans can be traced back 9,000 years, according to the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention .
“Archeologists found TB in the remains of a mother and child buried together,” in an ancient city that is now under the Mediterranean Sea, said the centers. “The earliest written mentions of TB were in India (3,300 years ago) and China (2,300 years ago).”
Throughout the ages, TB has been called several names, including “phthisis” in ancient Greece, “tabes” in ancient Rome and “schachepheth” in ancient Hebrew as well as “the white plague” and “consumption in English. During some outbreaks, people even believed that the illness was caused by vampires.
From the 1600s through the 1800s in Europe, what we now know was TB caused approximately a quarter of all deaths. A similar percentage of lives were claimed by TB in the U.S. until things started changing around the turn of the 20 th century.
Johann Schonlein coined the term “tuberculosis” in the 1834.
Dr. Robert Koch announced the discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in 1882 and in 1889, Dr. Hermann Biggs convinced the New York City Department of Health and Hygiene that doctors should report TB cases to the health department. By 1953, the CDC was publishing nationwide TB data.
Shortly after British film star Vivien Leigh appeared at Atlanta’s Loews Grand Theatre for the 1939 premiere of “Gone With the Wind”, she caught TB on a trip to North Africa, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
It would still be a few years before Selman Waksman, Elizabeth Bugie, and Albert Schatz developed the streptomycin antibiotic in 1943.
“Antibiotics were a major breakthrough in TB treatment,” explained the CDC. Waksman received the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for the discovery. Leigh would eventually die from TB in 1967, around the time that a cocktail of antibiotics was finally making it easier to beat the disease.
Although TB is not as common as it once was, people do still get infected with it today. According to the World Health Organizatio n, 10 million people around the world fall ill with TB every year and 1.5 million people die from it annually, making it the world’s top infectious killer.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis typically attacks the lungs, but it can impact any part of the body. Some people infected with the bacteria do not get sick and have what is called a latent TB infection (LTBI). Around a quarter of the world is estimated to have been infected with tuberculosis bacteria, but most do not develop TB disease.
“Most of the people who fall ill with TB live in low- and middle-income countries, but TB is present all over the world,” said the WHO. “About half of all people with TB can be found in eight countries: Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines and South Africa.”
Rates of TB incidence in the U.S. are among the lowest in the world, but that doesn’t mean it is totally eradicated here. Just last month, the CDC reported that TB rates have increased in the U.S. each year since 2020 after nearly three decades of decline.
“During 2023, a total of 9,615 TB cases were provisionally reported by the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia (DC), representing an increase of 1,295 cases (16%) as compared with 2022,” said the centers. “The rate in 2023 (2.9 per 100,000 persons) also increased compared with that in 2022.”
Last year, case counts and rates increased in 40 out of 50 states.
“This post-pandemic increase in U.S. cases highlights the importance of continuing to engage communities with higher TB rates and their medical providers in TB elimination efforts and strengthening the capacity in public health programs to carry out critical disease control and prevention strategies,” said the CDC. Tips for TB prevention are available here .
DOWNLOAD the Audacy App
SIGN UP and follow KCBS Radio
Facebook | Twitter | Instagram
Most Popular
Comments / 0