South Africa: Tuberculosis

Yesterday, I watched a short video about a high rate of TB and HIV/AIDS infected population in South Africa. Tuberculosis (TB) disease keeps spreading more and more throughout our world. Currently, 30% of those who are diagnosed with HIV are also infected with TB. To add to that, 70% of those who are found to have TB, also have HIV disease. As a result, there is a big intersection between the two. Unlike HIV, TB spreads through air; for example, you can get it from someone who is infected when they cough or sneeze and you happen to be around. In South Africa there have always been two different medical centers for patients with HIV and those with TB. However, Edendale Hospital is trying to develop a program that will treat HIV infected patients as well as TB patients since a large amount of people in South Africa are infected with both. Recently, in the BIOL440 class, we saw a movie clip of TB situation in Russian prisons. Also, we learned about Mycobacterium which causes TB, and we are going to cover more topics about it in the BIOL 440 course.

http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/video/index.html