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Weżd seen the deadly disease, consumption, mentioned in historical books or movies, but to tell the truth, we had no idea what it was. An informative page from Modern Drug Discovery solved the medical mystery. Consumption is an old name for tuberculosis (TB) that describes how the illness wastes away or consumes its victims. TB is "an ancient enemy" that has plagued humankind for more than five thousand years. The Greeks called it phthisis, and Hippocrates advised his medical students against treating it, because it was almost always deadly, and a dead patient was bad for business. Caused by a highly contagious bacterial infection,
TB is blamed for 20% of the deaths in 17th-century London and 30% of those in 19th-century Paris (as depicted in Moulin Rouge). In those days, the disease proved deadly for about 80% of its victims. It's estimated that TB has killed over 1 billion people in the last two centuries. In the past, patients were usually sent to a sanatorium, where a healthy climate (fresh air) and good nutrition were believed to combat the infection. Later, pneumothorax was used, a treatment that collapses the lung then allows it to heal. In the 1940s, advances in science led to the development of several drugs that proved effective against TB. The incidence of the disease began to drop, and it was believed that TB would be
extinct by 2010. Unfortunately, TB is far from being a disease of the past. An effective course of drug therapy lasts 6-8 months, and many patients discontinue the antibiotics before completing the whole regimen. To make matters worse, the TB strain continues to mutate and evolve, becoming more and more drug-resistant. And poverty and the AIDS epidemic, which weakens the immune system making it ripe for attack, have also helped lead to a resurgence of the disease. Every year, about 8 million people contract TB and 3 million die from it.
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