Facts about Tuberculosis

• The risk factors for acquiring TB include close-contact situations, alcohol and drug abuse, and certain diseases (for example, diabetes, cancer, and HIV) and occupations (for example, healthcare workers).

• The most common symptoms and signs of TB are fatigue, fever, weight loss, coughing, and night sweats.

• The diagnosis of TB involves skin tests, chest X-rays, sputum analysis (smear and culture), and PCR tests to detect the genetic material of the causative bacteria.

• Inactive tuberculosis may be treated with an antibiotic, isoniazid (INH), to prevent the TB infection from becoming active.

• Active TB is treated, usually successfully, with INH in combination with one or more of several drugs, including rifampin (Rifadin), ethambutol (Myambutol), pyrazinamide, and streptomycin.

• Drug-resistant TB is a serious, as yet unsolved, public-health problem, especially in Southeast Asia, the countries of the former Soviet Union, Africa, and in prison populations. Poor patient compliance, lack of detection of resistant strains, and unavailable therapy are key reasons for the development of drug-resistant TB.

The occurrence of HIV has been responsible for an increased frequency of tuberculosis. Control of HIV in the future, however, should substantially decrease the frequency of TB.

• Most adults have been infected but do not have the disease. They only progress to the disease when the immune system is reduced through diseases such as HIV; long-term steroid use; use of chemotherapy agents and cancers.

• In Ghana, the total number of people who had Tuberculosis in 2012 was 15,198 out of which 856 were children. Treatment success rate was 85.5 per cent and death rate was 10.7 per cent.

• Most pulmonary tuberculosis will present with long standing cough with or without blood, weight loss, drenching night sweats (not the dom so dom so type), loss of appetite, swelling of lymph nodes, low grade fever and so forth. It could also be extra pulmonary conditions, which is common in children. These include TB meningitis, TB of the spinal bone, TB lymph adenitis and so forth. Tuberculosis can affect practically every part of the body.