Welcome to this weeks Health and Fitness.
An ancient disease that has ravaged the world continues into the 21st century, taking its toll in lives. Tuberculosis is once again making headlines killing 1.8 million people as the world’s 7th most deadly disease. The disease is still epidemic in many parts of the world and is common opportunistic disease in HIV and AIDS patients.
As is now custom, I’ll try to include the more interesting and pertinent articles that will help the community awareness of their health and bodies. This essay will not be posted anywhere else due to constraints on my time and in January it will be coming to you from Paris, Fr. for awhile. Please feel free to make suggestions for improvement and ask questions, I’ll answer as best I can.
This is an open thread.
More funds needed for TB tests, drugs, vaccines
CANCUN, Mexico (Reuters) – Health experts on Thursday called for more research funding to develop better diagnostic tests, vaccines and drugs for tuberculosis, which killed 1.8 million people around the world last year.
While diseases like AIDS and malaria can be diagnosed in minutes by applying a drop of blood to a rapid test kit, confirming active tuberculosis, or TB, is a laborious procedure.
It requires a patient to cough up sputum, which is smeared on a slide, stained and examined under a microscope.
And the 100-year-old test misses up to 70 percent of otherwise positive cases in some places, experts say.
In Africa, where the scourge of TB is most keenly felt, many people delay follow-up testing because of cost.
“A lot of people die before a TB diagnosis is even made,” Dr Jeremiah Chakaya of the Kenya Medical Research Institute told reporters at an international conference on lung health in Cancun, Mexico.