Happy World TB-day everybody! This day ,24 March, is officially World Tuberculosis day. I suppose it is not like Father’s Day when we pay homage to the dads and rush out last minute to buy an overpriced card. So relax, you don’t need to rustle up a quick gift for the TB-sufferer in the cubicle next to you.
The World Health Organisation established this day to raise awareness around TB, remember those lives it has claimed, and celebrate its prevention and treatment.
Now, I can just imagine that most of you are losing the will to live right now because you’re thinking there couldn’t be a more boring subject to read about and you’re already zoning out in TB-tedium. You might think you’d rather watch missiles fly all across the news channels or lose yourself in some newly discovered scandal in the Epstein files. But, here’s the plot twist… TB is actually utterly fascinating.
I recently read the book Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green (yes, the same John Green who wrote The fault in our stars). This book is brilliant, not just in my weird-genre preferences opinion.It was a New York Times #1 bestseller, a Washington Post #1 bestseller, an Indie Bestseller, and USA Today bestseller! PLUS it stayed on the best NY times best seller book list for 23 weeks! It was a brilliant read, with TB stepping up as a living, breathing character, rather than a medical theme.
So, let’s begin at the beginning. The WHO decided that the 24th of March should be TB Day because it was the date in 1882 when Dr Robert Koch announced that he had discovered the bacterium that causes tuberculosis.
Before germ theory, TB was thought to be hereditary, a family curse, or an imbalance in your body. In a few places people believed that the dead could return and spread the illness around to those who harmed them while they were alive. In the 19th century, when tuberculosis was still known as the dreaded “consumption,” people did not understand it medically. So with the knowledge they had, and what they understood, the natural conclusion was (of course) that TB sufferers were vampires.
Just like these long-toothed creatures of the night, TB sufferers would become pale, thin and weak, and get sunken eyes. These were common features resembling the dead. The sick also often had bright red lips and regularly coughed up blood, which to the average 19th century peasant screamed “VAMPIRE-BEHAVIOUR”. To add some additional weight to this colourful theory, when people died from TB and other family members also became ill, it seemed logical that the dead vampire had returned, possessed family members and was sucking the life out of his or her remaining relatives
What I did not see coming was how TB affected our sense of style and fashion throughout the ages and influenced our current concept of beauty. During the Victorian period, it was fashionable to look sick for a while because the idea of having TB was quite romanticised. It was a disease associated with poets, writers, artists and academia. People aspired to look thin and fragile, and therefore somehow by association, intelligent. We also have TB to thank for the corset and fashion plates which women have been squeezing themselves into ever since. Revlon and Clinique can thank the disease for selling their rouge, blush and mascara, as red cheeks and shiny eyes were signs of the illness. The paler your skin, and the more you resembled a porcelain doll, the bigger your chances of convincing others that you were one of the sensitive souls who was clever enough to be graced by the disease.
We can also blame today’s current eating orders on TB. It seems that people so coveted the look of TB sufferers that women wanted to look emaciated and fragile as part of the “consumptive aesthetic”.
Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch turned the germ theory into accepted science. Once the man in the street started understanding how germs were spread, many routines and fashions changed. People started valuing cleanliness and bathing more regularly. To prevent pathogens like TB being brought into homes by sweeping long dresses gathering dirt from the streets, women started wearing shorter skirts. Men followed suit and started shaving their hairy dirty beards to prevent carrying germs.
So, we can agree that this disease, which likely dates back about 70 000 years, has a riveting history, but unfortunately, it is not just a disease of history. It is very much a present reality. Although a treatment was discovered for it in 1943, people still die of the disease today. Streptomycin has been used to cure patients since the early 1940s and treatments have continued to improve. Even drug-resistant strains are treatable. So why are people still dying from it?
Just like consumption shaped culture in many ways centuries before our time, our apathy towards tuberculosis today is making sure we still see its imprints everywhere in our society. People still cling to myths that TB is a poor person’s disease. It is not, but of course it is tied to poverty because the poor often can’t afford treatment or receive diagnoses. They cannot afford to travel to the right clinics, pay for the lengthy treatment required or take time off work to visit the medical centres and receive help.
It is a socio-economic challenge because patients might not understand the required long-term commitment in their treatment (often six months) and so, a relatively easy to cure TB can escalate into a drug-resistant strain that is much more dire and harder to overcome without specialised care.
Here are some interesting TB facts:
- TB kills more people than malaria
- TB is the leading cause of death among people with HIV
- TB spreads through the air when a person with active lung TB coughs, sneezes, speaks or spits.
- You have to inhale TB germs in order to be affected.
- 25% of the world’s population is estimated to have been infected with TB bacteria (although most people do not feel ill and cannot spread the bacteria)
- TB does not just affect your lungs. It can spread to other parts of your body like the brain, kidneys, spine, lymph nodes and bloodstream.
- TB persists not because it is unbeatable but because human systems have allowed a curable disease to keep killing people.
- TB does not spread by shaking hands, kissing, sharing utensils or sharing bathrooms.
- Here are some famous people who died of TB. (No wonder the general public thought consumption was a disease only the intellectuals got):
- John Keats
- Frédéric Chopin
- Anne Brontë
- Emily Brontë
- Franz Kafka
- George Orwell
- Jane Austen
- Robbie Burns
- John Calvin
- Molière
- Henry David Thoreau
- Eleanor Roosevelt
- Vivien Leigh
Now that we all know more about this ancient disease, understand bacteria and no longer need vampires and curses to explain illness, why are we not doing better? We know what causes the illness, how it spreads, how to fix it and yet, it is still allowed to kill.
It is awful to read about how people suffered in the past because people didn’t have the knowledge to help the ill, but is it not far worse that somehow, we seem to have the knowledge now but not the will?
On this World TB Day, instead of rushing out to buy a card, maybe you can take a moment to understand the illness, be willing to be part of the solution and stand up against a system that favours the wealthy, the educated and the empowered.