Tuberculosis transmission happens in a way that is very similar to many common colds. The most frequent method of transmission is when a person coughs and another person breathes in particles that were expelled from the lungs of the person coughing. Exposure to airborne bacteria from an infected person doesn’t necessarily guarantee tuberculosis transmission, and many people can easily fight off tuberculosis without ever getting sick. For those that do become ill, it is common for the disease to lie dormant for a lengthy period. The chances of tuberculosis transmission increase in people with immune system disorders such as autoimmune deficiency syndrome (AIDS).
In the 1800s and earlier, tuberculosis was a very dangerous disease. It killed many people around the world during those days, partly because there was generally no reliable way to treat the disease and people didn’t fully understand the way it was transmitted. Tuberculosis transmission was more common during those times, not because the disease was more contagious, but because there were generally more people walking around with severe infections, and they passed it on to others with their coughing.
Tuberculosis can progress in several different ways, but the most common method is for it to hibernate in a person’s body. After a lengthy period, which can sometimes be years, the tuberculosis symptoms will appear. These can include constant coughing, wasting away, coughing blood, and unexplained sweating. For some people, the symptoms may appear within a few weeks of transmission, but this is relatively rare.
Once a person has been diagnosed with tuberculosis, there is a relatively reliable treatment option available. The treatment can be fairly complex because there are often several drugs involved and they have to be taken at very specific times during each day. If patients make any mistakes in the timing of medications or miss doses, it can potentially throw the whole treatment plan off track temporarily. Another thing that makes the treatment difficult is that it often requires several months of following the strict medication plan to ensure that the disease goes away.
If people wait too long after the appearance of symptoms to seek treatment, tuberculosis can become much more dangerous. When it is left untreated, tuberculosis is still a potentially fatal illness. Among populations in poverty, tuberculosis is still often deadly, and it can also be very difficult for doctors to treat individuals with other health problems, like AIDS, for example, that might be impairing their immune systems.
