Tuberculosis Tb Quotes

Love hasn't got anything to do with the heart, the heart's a disgusting organ, a sort of pump full of blood. Love is primarily concerned with the lungs. People shouldn't say "she's broken my heart" but "she's stifled my lungs." Lungs are the most romantic organs: lovers and artists always contract tuberculosis. It's not a coincidence that Chekhov, Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Chopin, George Orwell and St Thérèse of Lisieux all died of it; as for Camus, Moravia, Boudard and Katherine Mansfield, would they have written the same books if it werent for TB?

Twentieth century women's fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Far more potently than any miracle medicine, relatively uncelebrated shifts in civic arrangements--better nutrition, housing, and sanitation, improved sewage systems and ventilation--had driven TB mortality down in Europe and America. Polio and smallpox had also dwindles as a result of vaccinations. Cains wrote, "The death rates from malaria, cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, scurvy, pellagra, and other scourges of the past have dwindled in the US because humankind has learned how to prevent these diseases.... To put most of the effort into treatment is to deny all precedent.

At this time, there was a superstition among upper class women that the blood of young children helped keep the bloom of youth and that young fat helped conserve a young skin. There was also TB raging through the city; at that time, it was a disease that was one hundred percent fatal, as in those years there was no penicillin, but there was a popular belief that ingested human blood soothed and healed tuberculosis. Enriqueta now began kidnapping children of all ages, some for prostitution and some to be killed to create her healing tonics and “facial crèmes.” Everything that she possibly could she used from these children: the blood, bones (that she pounded into powder), and the fat.

She had been maimed by an illness that was so far out of fashion it might have been a wartime recipe for pink blancmange made from cornflour when everyone these days ate real chocolate mouse and tiramisu. TB was Spam fritters and two-bar electric fires and mangles and string bags and French knitting and a Bakelite phone in a freezing hall and loose tea and margarine and the black of the newspaper coming off on your fingers and milk in glass bottles and books from Boots Lending library with a hole in the spine where they put the ticker, and doilies and antimacassars and the wireless tuned to the Light Programme. It was outside lavatories and condensation and slum dwellings and no supermarkets. It was tuberculosis, which had died with the end of people drinking nerve tonics and Horlicks.

Theobald Smith, yet another of those forgotten heroes of medical history. Smith, born in 1859, was the son of German immigrants (the family name was Schmitt) in upstate New York and grew up speaking German, so was able to follow and appreciate the experiments of Robert Koch more quickly than most of his American contemporaries. He taught himself Koch’s methods for culturing bacteria and was thus able to isolate salmonella in 1885, long before any other American could do so. Daniel Salmon was head of the Bureau of Animal Husbandry at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and was primarily an administrator, but the convention of the day was to list the bureau head as lead author on the department’s papers, and that was the name that got attached to the microbe. Smith was also robbed of credit for the discovery of the infectious protozoa Babesia, which is wrongly named for a Romanian bacteriologist, Victor Babeş. In a long and distinguished career, Smith also did important work on yellow fever, diphtheria, African sleeping sickness, and fecal contamination of drinking water, and showed that tuberculosis in humans and in livestock was caused by different microorganisms, proving Koch wrong on two vital points. Koch also believed that TB could not jump from animals to humans, and Smith showed that that was wrong, too. It was thanks to this discovery that pasteurization of milk became a standard practice. Smith was, in short, the most important American bacteriologist during what was the golden age of bacteriology and yet is almost completely forgotten now.

On the level of the individual patient, tuberculosis is now understood to be an infectious disease, but one that spreads unhurriedly from person to person, usually after a prolonged period of contact, and that characteristically attacks the body in a protracted siege. Similarly, in society as a whole, TB can be understood as an epidemic in slow motion, lasting even for centuries in a single place and then retreating gradually and mysteriously over the course of generations.

penicillin, which was discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming and put to therapeutic medical uses from 1941. Penicillin had no relevance to TB specifically, but it opened the way to the development of a series of additional “magic bullets” and to the belief that TB could be eradicated globally by a spectacular technological fix. The first of these “wonder drugs” applicable to tuberculosis was the antibiotic streptomycin, which was discovered at Rutgers University by Selman Waksman in 1943.

In miliary tuberculosis, Koch’s invading bacilli can metastasize throughout the body from an initial lesion in the lungs. But since Mycobacteria can sometimes enter the body via the different pathways of ingestion, inoculation, or vertical transmission, they can establish the original infection in a locus other than the lungs. This multiplicity of possible sites of infection makes tuberculosis one of the most polymorphous of all diseases, capable of attacking any tissue or organ—skin, heart, central nervous system, meninges of the brain, intestines, bone marrow, joints, larynx, spleen, kidney, liver, thyroid, and genitals. Potentially, therefore, TB can appear in a wide array of guises, enabling it to mimic other diseases and making physical diagnosis notoriously difficult.

The infection of kusang (the company of bad people) is worse than tuberculosis. TB will kill a person for just one life whereas this infection will ruin endless lives.

Tuberculosis is an airborne disease. Carried out of the lungs with each cough are thousands of fluid droplets, plumes of minuscule crusaders. Some of them will contain the tiny rod-shaped TB bacteria, each only three-thousandths of a millimetre long. The fluid droplets themselves start off fairly big, perhaps a few tenths of a millimetre. These droplets are being pulled downwards by gravity and once they hit the floor, at least they’re not going anywhere else. But it doesn’t happen quickly, because it’s not just liquids that are viscous. Air is too – it has to be pushed out of the way as things move through it. As the droplets drift downwards, they are bumped and jostled by air molecules that slow their descent. Just as the cream rises slowly through viscous milk to the top of the bottle, these droplets are on course to slide through the viscous air to reach the floor. Except they don’t. Most of that droplet is water, and in the first few seconds in the outside air, that water evaporates. What was a droplet big enough for gravity to pull it through the viscous air now becomes a mere speck, a shadow of its former self. If it was originally a droplet of spit with a tuberculosis bacterium floating about in it, it’s now a tuberculosis bacterium neatly packaged up in some leftover organic crud. The gravitational pull on this new parcel is no match for the buffeting of the air. Wherever the air goes, the bacterium goes. Like the miniaturized fat droplets in today’s homogenized milk, it’s just a passenger. And if it lands in a person with a weak immune system, it might start a new colony, growing slowly until new bacteria are ready to be coughed out all over again.

Today nearly two billion people on earth may host the tuberculosis bacterium. Over the next decade, ninety million will develop active TB. Eventually thirty million will die. Tuberculosis, once the most Romantic of illnesses, is now the deadliest disease on earth. Controlling the bacterium is the twenty-first century’s greatest public health challenge.

At the other end of the train car, the middle-aged man opens his coat to reveal a red supervillain outfit underneath. His chest has the letters TB on it, plus a picture of jacks. Not the kind you use on a car, but the kind kids play with. And the TB doesn’t stand for tuberculosis, either. This is Jack the Toy Boy. Erg. His name makes him sound more like a porn star than a supervillain.