After reading a quote from Dr. Mario Raviglione, Director of WHO Stop TB, "without immediate, massive scale-up, the growing Drug Resistant TB pandemic puts decades of progress in confronting tuberculosis at risk, sending us back to the pre-antibiotic era", I found in The Lancet this interesting article.
---- In 1981, HIV/AIDS arrived in people's lives, at doctors' clinics, and on policy makers' desks. It didn't take long before historical parallels were drawn. AIDS was plague returned, claimed some. Others countered with different historical lessons: people infected with HIV were being treated like lepers. Slightly more on the mark was the precedent sought in historical management of sexually transmitted diseases. Assessed equally as misguided or offering useful templates that could be tweaked, analysing the early “venereal disease” campaigns certainly repaid the policy and historical effort. But one disease that was rarely historically paralleled with HIV/AIDS was tuberculosis. Currently, of course, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis are alarmingly connected: co-infection fuels the global epidemic of tuberculosis, disproportionately in sub-Saharan Africa. But when reflecting on the history of tuberculosis I've become interested in the similarities between old therapies for tuberculosis and more recent attitudes about managing HIV. The tuberculosis treatment at issue predates the antibiotic innovations of the late 1940s and the artificial pneumothorax fad of the 1930s. It is the “open-air” treatment in the sanatorium, which became popular worldwide from the 1890s. There, consumptives were caught up in some of the earliest conduct-based, risk-minimisation programmes. Patients were not cured of tuberculosis in the sanatorium, nor were they there to die. Rather, the disease would be contained in their bodies, and they would be taught how to live safely in the general community, while never forgetting that they were permanently infective. In short, they were turned into “people living with tuberculosis”.
