Tag Archives: tuberculosis

Diseases

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I am fascinated by the diseases that have stalked humans since they began walking on two legs and have blogged about some of these pathogens. TB: scarring on the fossilized bones of ancient bovines, diabetes: described in Egyptian and Greek writings, polio: pictured on ancient Egyptian stele. My point is that many of these diseases have been with us for a long time until better sanitation and vaccines pushed them back.

Cancer, a disease that seems to be a scourge during modern times, and a disease that still resists easy treatment, has probably also been with us for millennia. Well, many cancers probably escaped detection since they were inside the body and not visible unless an autopsy was performed. (The history of autopsies is a whole other fascinating topic since they have been permitted, or not, depending on the culture.) Breast cancer is the exception since it is visible. Evidence of breast cancer dates back 4200 years to ancient Egypt. Remains from that period display classic symptoms of the disease. For thousands of years, there was no treatment but cauterization and/or mastectomy. If the discovery of the remains is any indication, these treatments were not successful ones.

What about the so-called lifestyle diseases? Type II diabetes is one and, I suspect, present even in ancient times. Present perhaps, but not prevalent, as most people struggled to find enough to eat.

We know that apoplexy was present, and probably high blood pressure. But what about cholesterol? Although mitigated by exercise, it is not a cure. The effects of cholesterol is a fairly recent discovery.

Why do so many people now seem to develop these ‘lifestyle’ diseases? We all live longer. In Rees’s time, the average life span was in the forties. (This is skewed by maternal deaths during childbirth.) There were always people who lived longer, to the sixties and seventies. And sometimes much longer. The risk factors for developing choldesterol, hypertension, heart disease and so on increase with age.

With increased lifespans comes increased risk for disease. It doesn’t seem quite fair, does it?

Epidemics – Tuberculosis

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In my Will Rees mysteries, he meets people who are ill with tuberculosis several times. The frequency of deaths from this disease in my fiction in not an accident. It was a pandemic that still has not been eradicated. In 2017, there were more than 10 million cases of active TB which resulted in 1.6 million deaths; it is therefore the number one cause of death from an infectious disease. Most of these deaths, and most of the new infections, occur in the developing world.

I was mostly familiar with TB as ‘consumption’, a disease that afflicted Victorian poets. Although TB was common in both the poets, the upper classes and the slum-dwellers, it was not a new disease during Victorian times. It has been around for millennia. Bison remains from 17,000 years ago display the effects of the disease.  (No one is sure if TB jumped to humans from the bovine like smallpox or whether it developed independently.) TB scars have been found on Neolithic skeletons and on the spines of Egyptian mummies.

So, it has been around a very long time. Despite that, it was not identified as a single disease until 1820 and the bacillus that caused it was not discovered until 1882 (by Robert Koch. He received the Nobel prize but failed to recognize that one of the transmissions of TB was via infected milk.)

Before the advent of antibiotics, and even with the best care in the sanatoriums set up for this purpose, 50% of the patients died within five years. In 1815, one in four died of the illness in England.

Antibiotics beat back the disease, but new drug resistant strains raise the possibility of a new epidemic. Even now, in modern times, about one quarter of the world’s population is infected with TB.