Discovery of tuberculosis

The disease of tuberculosis, has been known for centuries. Mummies from the Egyptian pre-dynastic era and the Peruvian pre-Columbian era show typical vertebral lesions. Tuberculosis was well known in classical Greece, where it was called phthisis. Hippocrates clearly recognized tuberculosis and understood its clinical presentation.

The oldest evidence for human tuberculosis was found in a Neolithic infant and woman in a 9000-year-old settlement in the Eastern Mediterranean.

In 1720, for the first time, the infectious origin of tuberculosis was conjectured by the English physician Benjamin Marten, in his publication “A new theory of Consumption.”

Both terms consumption and phthisis were used in the 17th and 18th centuries, until in the mid-19th century Johann Lukas Schönlein coined the term “tuberculosis”.

Understanding of the pathogenesis of tuberculosis began with the work of Theophile Laennec at the beginning of the 19th century and was further advanced by the demonstration of the transmissibility of Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection by Jean-Antoine Villemin in 1865.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis, then known as the "tubercle bacillus," was first described on March 24, 1882 by Robert Koch. Using the methylene blue staining recommended by Paul Ehrlich, he identified, isolated and cultivated the bacillus in animal serum. Finally, he reproduced the disease by inoculating the bacillus into laboratory animals.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the etiologic agent of tuberculosis in humans. Humans are the only reservoir for the bacterium. Robert Koch presented this extraordinary result to the society of Physiology in Berlin on 24 March 1882. Further molecular analysis of these very first isolates confirmed the identification of M. tuberculosis and indicated that Koch’s isolates belong to the ‘modern’ lineage of M. tuberculosis.

Clemens von Pirquet developed the tuberculin skin test in 1907 and 3 years later used it to demonstrate latent tuberculous infection in asymptomatic children. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries sanatoria developed for the treatment of patients with tuberculosis.
Discovery of tuberculosis

History of Tuberculosis

History of Tuberculosis
In the Paleolithic period, people lived as wanderers, did not settle in villages or permanent locations, and do not congregate in large groups.

While tuberculosis may have occurred sporadically, it an other infections disease probably did not occur in epidemic form.

Beginning in about 8000 BC, humans developed primitive agricultural techniques that allowed settlement in permanent sites and with this development came the domestication of cattle, swine and sheep.

In all probability, tuberculosis occurred more frequently in this setting, but it nevertheless remained rare.

Tuberculosis probably occurred as an endemic disease among animals long before it affected humans. Mycobacterium bovis was the most likely infecting organism and the first human infections may have been with Mycobacterium bovis.

Since Mycobacterium tuberculosis infects all primate species, it is also possible that this species existed in subhuman primates before it became established in humans.

Tuberculosis probably occurred as a sporadic and unimportant disease of humans in their early history. Epidemic spread began slowly with increasing population density.

This spread and the selective pressure it has exerted have occurred at different times around the globe.

The epidemic slowly spread worldwide as a result of infected European travelling to and colonizing distant sites.

In the 1700s and early 1800s tuberculosis prevalence peaked in Western Europe and the United States and was undoubtedly the largest cause of death.

100 to 200 years later it had spread in full force to Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa and South America.

1.6 millions death worldwide due to tuberculosis in year 2002 alone. Currently tuberculosis kills 1.8 million people each year. However scientist believed that can be averted by 2050 with better testing, drugs and vaccines.

Treatment from 1995 to 2008 saved six millions lives. However 36 millions infected with tuberculosis during 1995-2008 were cured and incidence of the lung wasting disease has begun to regress, but only by about one percent per year.
History of Tuberculosis

Paleopathology and Tuberculosis

Paleopathology and Tuberculosis
Paleopathology tells us that infections sand infectious disease affected living beings in the every remote past.

Bacteria have been found in a one of a Permian reptile (about 200 million years old) and in many other specimens of man and animal up to historical times.

Pathological alterations indicating tuberculosis of the bones (e.g., Pott’s disease have been found in many early Old World’s specimens, which indicate that the disease has existed there since antiquity while it has long been suspected that it existed in the New World as well.

Until recently, no clear signs of pulmonary tuberculosis had been found in mummies the only remains that could show such a disease in the remote past.

Paleopathologists, however in view of the unlikelihood of osseous tuberculosis in the absence of the pulmonary kind, have held that the absence of findings probably due to technical reasons and that “some form of granulomatous tuberculosis has infected man since Neolithic times.”
Paleopathology and Tuberculosis