Tuberculosis also called as TB , is an infective disease that is caused by mycobacteria, primarily Mycobacterium tuberculosis and it commonly attacks the lungs as pulmonary TB, but it can also attack almost any part of the body mainly, the central nervous system CNS , the circulatory system, the lymphatic system, the urinary system,joints, bones and even the skin. TB is spread from person to person mainly through the air.

Over 1/3 of the total world’s population has been exposed to the TB bacterium, and new transmissions occur at a rate of 1 per second.Not everybody infected gets the complete disease; symptomless, inactive TB infection is the most common. However, one in ten inactive infections will lead to active TB disease, which if left untreated may kill more than half of its victims.

People with TB in their lungs or throat when cough,sneeze, laugh, sing, or even talk, the germs that cause TB may spread throughout the air. If the other person sitting nearby inhales this air, there is a chance that they also will become infected with tuberculosis.

There is a great difference between the persons being infected with TB and the persons having TB disease. A person who gets infected with TB has the TB germs in their body. The body’s defenses are protecting them from the germs and they are not sick. This is referred to as latent or inactive TBI.

A person with TB disease is sick and hence can spread disease to other people as well. Such person needs to see a doctor as early as possible. This is referred to as active TBI.Even out if someone becomes infected with TB, that does not mean they’ll get TB disease. Most of the who become infected do not develop TB disease because their body’s defenses protect them. Most active cases of TB disease result from activating old infection in people with impaired immune systems.

However, It is not so easy to become easily infected with tuberculosis. Generally a person has to be very close to the individual suffering from TB disease for a longer period of time. TB is thus, usually spread between family members, close friends, and people who work or live together. TB is spread almost easily in closed spaces over a long period of time.

Individuals in this world are newly infected with TB bacilli every second and one-third of the world’s population is currently infected with TB. Only about 10% of these people develop TB disease in their lifetime. The other 90 percent will never get sick from the TB germs or be able to spread them to other people.

TB can be a hard disease to diagnose, mainly due to the trouble in culturing this slow-growing organism in the laboratory. An allover medical evaluation for TB includes a medical history, a chest X-ray, and a physical examination.

When this disease becomes active, 75 percent of the cases are of the serious pulmonary TB. The Symptoms includes chest pain, coughing up blood, and a prolonged cough for more than 3 weeks. Systemic symptoms include fever, chills, night sweats, appetite loss, weight loss, and often a tendency to fatigue very easily.

In the remaining 25 percent of the active cases, the infection moves from the lungs, causing other kinds of TB more common in immunosuppressed persons and young children. Extra-pulmonary infection sites include the pleura, the CNS in meningitis, the lymphatic system in scrofula of the neck, the urinary system in urogenital tuberculosis, and bones and joints in Pott’s disease of the spine. An especially serious form is disseminated TB, more commonly known as miliary tuberculosis. While the extrapulmonary TB is not communicable, it may co-exist with pulmonary TB, which is transmittable.

Treatment for TB depends on checking the condition that whether if the person has active TB or only the TB infection.

A person who gets infected with TB, and t does not have active TB, can be given a preventive therapy. This therapy aims to kill the germs that do no  harm right now, but can do so in the future if left untreated..

On the other hand, if the patient has active TB then urgent treatment is required.The patient usually gets a combination of several drugs and probably begins to feel better only a few weeks after he/she starts to take the drugs.However, the medicines are not taken correctly and the patient becomes sick with TB a 2nd time, then the TB disease may get harder to treat because it then becomes drug resistant. It means that the TB germs in the body are unaffected by the drugs used to treat the disease.

Several countries use BCG vaccine as part of their TB control programs, especially for infants. TB prevention and control takes two parallel advances. In the first, people with TB and their contacts are discovered and then treated. Recognition of infections involves testing high-risk groups for TB. In the second approach, children are vaccinated to protect them from TB. Unluckily, no vaccine is available that can provide reliable protection to adults.

TB is a growing and major world wide problem, particularly in Africa where the spread has been facilitated by AIDS.  There is much higher risk of people with AIDS to get infected with TB as they have little immunity.

It’s estimated that nearly one billion people will become newly infected, over 150 million will become sick, and 36 million will die worldwide between now and 2020 – if the control is not strengthened further. Every year there are more than 8.8 million cases and close to 1.6 million deaths attributed to TB.