The third part of the world's population is infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Every year 10 million people suffer from bacillary forms of tuberculosis. 3-4 million people die annually from tuberculosis, which is about 6% of all deaths worldwide.
The disease is Mycobacterium tuberculosis, or tubercle bacillus.
Contagious nature of tuberculosis in 1882 proved the German physician Robert Koch, he also discovered and mycobacterium that causes the disease. Unlike other bacteria, mycobacterium tuberculosis is extremely tenacious: excellent feeling in the ground and in the snow, resistant to alcohol, acid and alkali. It can only be killed by prolonged exposure to direct sunlight, high temperatures and chlorine-containing substances.
In the active form of tuberculosis bacillus Koch multiplies rapidly in the lungs of the patient, damaging the lungs and the human food poisoning his life. The process of tuberculous intoxication, otherwise, the poisoning of the human body develops an allergy cell. Mycobacterium tuberculosis have considerable resistance to various physical and chemical agents, cold, heat, moisture and light. Under natural conditions in the absence of sunlight, they can survive for several months. In the street dust mycobacteria persist for 10 days, in books, they can stay alive for three months, the water stored in the mycobacteria within 150 days.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis can withstand the processes of decay and may persist for several months in the buried corpses.
Mycobacterium tuberculosis is transmitted mainly by airborne droplets. Tuberculosis is most commonly characterized by a chronic course, a variety of clinical forms and failure of various organs, mainly the respiratory system.
The transfer of the pathogen is airborne, as well as through the milk of cows with tuberculosis. However, infected by TB, a person does not have to get sick. Only 5-15% of infected people get sick, the rest is produced sterile immunity. Especially patients with infectious TB of larynx, bronchi and destructive forms of pulmonary teburkuleza.
In addition to the lungs, TB can affect various organs and tissues of man: his eyes, bones, skin, genitourinary tract, intestines, etc.
Symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis
In case of contact of Koch bacillus in the lungs (or other body to which the first falls tubercle bacillus) is developing the primary site of inflammation, which is expressed in the usual symptoms of inflammation. But in contrast to the banal infection inflammation in tuberculosis develops very slowly (a chronic infection that lasts for years).
Complaints of patients with pulmonary tuberculosis mnogooobrazny. They can be divided into nonspecific: malaise, weakness, fever, poor appetite, weight loss, pale skin, etc., and specific (characteristic mainly tuberculosis): compulsive, prolonged cough, sweating at night and early morning hours (as a sign of intoxication, harassing the patient ), the temperature difference between morning and evening no more than 0.5 degrees, etc.
The differential diagnosis between tuberculosis and a number of other lung diseases, often requiring the use of surgical treatment, presents considerable difficulties. In addition, often these or other pathological processes (cancer, bronchiectasis, persistent atelectasis lobe or lung, etc.) are developed on the background of tuberculosis, or even the last is the immediate cause of his development.
