TB Honest

It's time for our third and final post on TB, or at least for the time being. Part one and part two are here if you haven't read them yet. In my last post, we talked about the course of a tuberculosis infection. Now let's dig into how we've treated TB over our history. Treatment Antiquity A disease as old as tuberculosis has endured many treatment regimes over the centuries, some worse than others. Hippocrates prescribed milk, food, and exercise for his patients. The Roman physician Galen recommended fresh air and sea voyages in addition to the milk. It also appears that he and other doctors of his time advised that their patients eat wolf liver and drink elephant urine. Our ancestors treated their tuberculosis with bloodletting as well, which isn't a surprise because bloodletting is a terrible treatment that was used to treat everything back then. Other treatments included: inhaling smoke, licking limestone, consuming animal fat, and eating butter boile...

Here we are for part two of the posts covering the basics of tuberculosis. Part one is over here if you haven't read that yet. Last time we talked a little about the history of tuberculosis as well as the biology of bacteria. So today we're going to dive back in and talk about how TB spreads. Transmission and Spread  One of the biggest benefits of living in the 21st century is that we have a much better understanding of the world around us compared to our ancestors. For example, nowadays we know that tuberculosis is caused by a tiny infectious organism. For the majority of our species' existence (which is also probably how long TB has been infecting us), we thought otherwise. Before germ theory got going, it was a common belief that tuberculosis was a hereditary disease that spread among family members.(6) But now we know better. The tuberculosis bacteria spread from person to person through airborne droplets. We produce these droplets by coughing, sneezing, an...

Welcome to the first disease post of TB Honest. If you haven't already, I recommend you take a look at the introduction . This post took me some time to get together because TB is complicated and I'm figuring out how I want to format my disease posts. I'll keep refining this as I go, but I realized that the original post was way too long so I'm cutting into multiple, more digestible posts. The next part should be up in a couple days. Well, here we are talking about our very first disease. One of the oldest and most feared infectious diseases on the planet, it has been called the White Plague, phthisis, and consumption. It holds epithets such as the robber of youth, the graveyard cough, and Captain of all these men of Death.(6) It's the namesake for this blog. It's tuberculosis. Along with HIV and malaria, TB is one of the top priorities for public health. Of all infectious diseases in the world, it is the number one killer. In 2015, tuberculosis killed 1....