Almost a century ago, Tuberculosis was everywhere. It took the lives of many people. From babies, intellects, brides, firemen, heads of states among others.
It was a destroyer and acquiring it was not hard- simply by air as you breathe. TB was a pervasive disease that consumed people.
Actually, “consumption” got its name from the severe weight loss that so many of the afflicted suffered. The other 19th-century nickname for tuberculosis was even more evocative: “the white plague,” on account of the ashen complexion of its victims.
Tuberculosis remains a major killer. As antibiotic-resistant strains of the disease spread across the globe, it’s getting harder to wipe out. In the next three decades, drug-resistant strains of the bacteria could drive up tuberculosis deaths by 2.4 million per year—to some 4 million fatalities annually, according to a recent study.
Generally, TB is spread through human-human contact or through the air when a TB-infected person coughs or sneezes.
But there are two main ways that people get sick with drug-resistant TB. The first way is that people who are sick with tuberculosis fail to take a full course of antibiotics, and the bacteria develop a resistance to drugs that would otherwise knock it out.
The second way is that a person is infected with a strain of the bacteria that’s resistant to antibiotics, to begin with. (Extensively drug-resistant TB, sometimes called “total drug-resistant TB,” is an even more severe category of multi-drug resistant TB.)
Drug-resistant tuberculosis is a huge problem in many African countries. Although the precise number of cases is unknown, public health officials estimate that, of the hundreds of thousands of people who develop tuberculosis in these countries each year, tens of thousands of them have drug-resistant strains.
For this reason, it is very important for serious prevention measures to help reduce this menace. Anyone diagnosed with the disease should quickly be rushed to the hospital for proper treatment so as not to affect the rest.
This gives a reason why TB should not be ignored and both the government and the citizens can work together to combat this killer of Africa.