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 Taking a long, hard look at tuberculosis
Tuberculosis in a few words
Tuberculosis is an infectious disease caused by a bacterium. Without treatment, within two years it will prove lethal for half of the persons suffering from the disease.
With adequate treatment, 95 % of patients can be completely cured. However, each year almost two million people die from the disease. Each year, eight to ten million people contract the disease. Of these cases, only half are detected, treated and recorded. One third of the world's population are carriers of tuberculosis without actually developing the disease. Once a person's immune defence level is lowered, the disease can strike again at any moment.
Treatment of Tuberculosis
Most people can be cured through a frontline treatment called DOTS. This treatment is very cost effective.
Tuberculosis today
Around the beginning of the twentieth century, tuberculosis used to kill one person out of seven in Western Europe. Then, people called it the "white plague". Improved living conditions on the one hand, and on the other, more efficient methods of treatment have allowed us to arrive at a much less dramatic turn of events. We thought that we had won the battle against the disease, but no...
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