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From the Great Plague of the Middle Ages, to the Influenza Pandemic of the early 20th Century, to the fight against HIV today, disease is woven in to the fabric of our past, present and future. Tuberculosis may not have the obvious impact of the great pandemics of the past, but it greatly intertwined with our history, having claimed the lives of a myriad of famous names. Known also as "consumption", persons such as George Orwell, John Keats, and Robert Louis Stevenson all suffered, and died from, tuberculosis. Of course, it's important to mention that tuberculosis has also claimed the lives of millions of anonymous victims as well. Now for the key questions; What is tuberculosis? What do the symptoms look like? And most importantly, how can we treat it?

Tuberculosis is caused by a bacteria called "Mycobacterium tuberculosis". It is shaped like a miniature Twinkie - a shape doctors call a bacillus. For many years in the late twentieth century, tuberculosis was well controlled, with the number of new cases in America in a steady decline. That trend has reversed itself, largely due to an upsurge in immigration from endemic parts of the world. The increased incidence of tuberculosis in people with HIV has effected this upward trend as well.

An infection with tuberculosis goes through two major stages.

The first stage is the primary infection. This results from exposure to an actively contagious host, usually via small "aerosolized" water droplets. Have you ever seen the fine mist that people spray around a room when they sneeze? Just think of those tiny water droplets from the sneeze as a swarm of tuberculosis life boats, on which the bacteria can escape from one infected host and travel to the next victim. Transmission can happen via coughing, kissing, sharing water glasses, or any other way in which infected fluid particles can travel from one person to another.

The primary infection is usually self-limited and without overt symptoms. A minority of people who become infected will show symptoms. These symptoms are typically a cough and fever. In people with certain risk factors, such as immune system damage, older age, infants and the presence of other lung disease, the bacteria can "seed" itself in the lungs. Once the bacteria become permanent residents in your lungs, they can become dormant for some time, only to reactivate months or years later. This seeding will happen in approximately 10-15% of people who are exposed to tuberculosis.

For that small percentage

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