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World Tuberculosis Day
City of Seattle | King County | WA State
World Tuberculosis Day - March 24, 2006
Partners
American Lung Association® of Washington and IdahoWashington State Tuberculosis Advisory Council
Public Health - Seattle/King County Tuberculosis Division
Washington State Department of Health - Tuberculosis Division
Firland Foundation
RESULTS
International Community Health Services
Snohomish County Health District
History
Tuberculosis, originally in the form Mycobacterium bovis, spread from cows to humans 8,000 to 10,000 years ago and mutated into its current form Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Evidence of characteristic tuberculosis scars have been found in Egyptian mummies and the disease persists today, infecting roughly 2 billion people, one-third of the world's population.
Tuberculosis is a disease that thrives in humans and travels from one infected human to others via particles exhaled from the lungs often by coughing or singing. In our global village tuberculosis migrates and travels as humans do. It is slow growing and usually affects the lungs, but can spread and infect other organs, bones, the eyes, the spinal column and the lymph system.
On March 24, 1882 Robert Koch, a German physician, announced to a German assembly of physicians that "one-seventh of all human beings die of tuberculosis and ... if one considers only the productive middle-age groups, tuberculosis carries away one-third and often more of these."1 He discovered that tuberculosis is caused by a bacterium, contrary to the long-held belief that tuberculosis is a hereditary disease. In the new State of Washington, the Tuberculosis epidemic had reached virtually every living person. It accounted for 124 out of 1,356 deaths in 1892 and reached a high of 1,406 out of 12,000 total deaths in 1913.
Hope was at hand as physicians searched for methods to prevent and cure this disease. In 1904 the National Society for the Prevention and Cure of Tuberculosis (the present day American Lung Association®) was formed with America's leading physician researchers at its helm, including Dr. Livingston Trudeau, who had pioneered the American sanatorium movement as a cure for Tuberculosis. On September 12, 1906, Dr. William Kellog, a physician in Spokane who himself was infected with Tuberculosis, founded the state's first Society. Dr Kellog was to die soon thereafter from the disease, but his efforts were taken up again following a critical 1908 federal report which declared Seattle's record of fighting the disease to be "the worst in the country". After the formation of the King County Society in 1909, a team of visiting nurses was engaged to assess the need for tuberculosis services for the poor, and they identified over 1000 new cases. The first "public" sanatorium was built in the Richmond Highlands area of Seattle in just three years with the help of Horace Henry (railroad magnate and founder of the society) and the passage of a city bond measure. The "Firland" sanatorium's first true medical director was Dr. Robert Stith, who built the center into one of the leading tuberculosis treatment and research programs.
By 1920 over 15 County associations existed in Washington and more Sanatoriums were built to accommodate patients. Over the next 20 years the Society published educational articles on Tuberculosis for patients and developed public awareness campaigns and succeeded in reducing the tuberculosis case rate by over 80% without yet the discovery of a cure. In 1932 the national society engaged the commissioned research into soil microbes that were resistant to tuberculosis, and eleven years later Dr. Selman Waksman published his findings and discovered Streptomycin, the first cure for tuberculosis. Seven years later, the American Lung Association® discovered isoniazid, a drug that is effective for treating tuberculosis in children.
Thanks again to the ingenuity of the American Lung Association®, a unique business partnership was created to develop the first mobile x-ray machines in 1929, and in 1943 Seattle received its first such mobile unit. The last mobile unit was decommissioned in 1971 ending the major public health push for the elimination of tuberculosis. In 1973 the Firland Sanatorium, which had enjoyed a newer home in Shoreline since 1947, finally closed its doors.
While the efforts of the first half of the century were successful in removing the disease from most strata of society, tuberculosis was by no means eliminated. In the 1990's, due to a confluence of a new epidemic of HIV and an undermined tuberculosis prevention funding system, tuberculosis cases surged in New York, accounting for more than one sixth of the nation's active cases. This time tuberculosis was more resistant to the drug treatments that had cured it before, and new cocktails had to be concocted to resist its spread.
In this century we still stand facing the oncoming threat of tuberculosis and a worldwide epidemic. As our co-mingling with other countries around the world increases, the presence of a new outbreak remains. New tests for detecting the disease have been discovered, yet research is still desperately needed to discover better and faster treatments for an increasingly resistant and virulent bacterium.
In honor of Robert Koch and his contribution to the understanding of tuberculosis which begun on March 24, 1882, and all the communities of our state that joined together to conquer this epidemic, we now recognize March 24 as World Tuberculosis Day.
References:
TIMEBOMB: The Global Epidemic of Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis. Reichman, Lee B., MD, MPH.;
Tuberculosis in Early Washington: Crisis and Christmas Seals. Wilbur Hallet (In print)
Tuberculosis | World TB Day | Tuberculosis Education
History | Today | Famous People with Tuberculosis
Proclamations:
City of Seattle | King County | WA State
Today
LocalIt is estimated that 100,000 people in King County have Latent Tuberculosis Infection.
Currently there are more than 250 cases of active and contagious tuberculosis in Washington State and over 100 cases in King County alone.
Two thirds of people in Washington with active and contagious tuberculosis were born outside of the United States, a demographic our state depends on for our economy to thrive. Approximately three to four months of work time are lost for each employee who develops active tuberculosis, which ultimately affects the price of goods in our state.
TB outbreaks are costly and require extensive contact investigations to identify newly infected people. More than 10,000 public health dollars are spent on treatment and subsequent contact investigation for each case of active tuberculosis.
One case of active tuberculosis that has developed multi-drug resistance can cost up to $250,000 to cure.
InternationalLatent Tuberculosis infects more than 2 billion people, roughly 1/3 of the world's population.
8 million people will develop active tuberculosis this year and 3 million people will die of the disease.
According to a Global Health Initiative survey of 11,000 businesses, 32% of companies worldwide expect tuberculosis to impact their businesses within the next 5 years.
Bill Gates and his charitable foundation will dedicate $900 million by 2015 for tuberculosis eradication worldwide.
Tuberculosis | World TB Day | Tuberculosis Education
History | Today | Famous People with Tuberculosis
Proclamations:
City of Seattle | King County | WA State
Famous People With Tuberculosis
Writers and PoetsHonoré de Balzac
Anne Brontë
Charlotte Brontë
Emily Brontë
Charles Farrar Browne
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Robert Burns
Lord Byron
Anton Chekov
Tristan Corbière
Stephen Crane
René Daumal
Jean de Brunhoff
Guy de Maupassant
Fyodor Dostoevski
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Paul Éluard
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Maxim Gorky
Dashiell Hammett
Saima Harmaja
Iulia Hasdeu
Robert A. Heinlein
Miguel Hernández
Washington Irving
Panait Istrati
Helen Hunt Jackson
Alfred Jarry
Samuel Johnson
Franz Kafka
John Keats
Charles Kingsley
Sidney Lanier
D. H. Lawrence
Betty MacDonald
Katherine Mansfield
Somerset Maugham
Molière
Eugene O'Neill
George Orwell
Walker Percy
Edgar Allan Poe
Alexander Pope
Llewelyn Powys
Winthrop Mackworth Praed
John Reed
Edmond Rostand
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
John Ruskin
Albert Samain
Friedrich Schiller
Sir Walter Scott
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Juliusz Slowacki
Tobias Smollett
Laurence Sterne
Robert Louis Stevenson
Alan Sillitoe
Dylan Thomas
Francis Thompson
Henry David Thoreau
Voltaire
Lesya Ukrainka
Thomas Wolfe
Jirí Wolker
Artists
Frédéric Bartholdi
Marie Bashkirtseff
Aubrey Beardsley
Harry Clarke
Paul Gauguin
Boris Kustodiev
Amedeo Modigliani
Elizabeth Siddal
Andrei Ryabushkin
Composers
Frédéric Chopin
Stephen Foster
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Niccolo Paganini
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi
Henry Purcell
Johann Schein
Cat Stevens
Religious Figures
John Calvin
Cardinal Richelieu
St Thérèse de Lisieux
St Bernadette Soubirous
Leaders
Simón Bolívar
Edward VI of England
Ulysses S. Grant
Andrew Jackson
Muhammed Ali Jinnah
Sir Wilfrid Laurier
Louis XIII of France
Louis XVII of France
Nelson Mandela
Napoleon II of France
Manuel L. Quezon
Eleanor Roosevelt
Dmitri Pavlovitch Romanov
Alexander Stephens
Tutankhamun
John Young
Others
Niels Abel
Renée Adorée
Beulah Annan
Frédéric Bastiat
Alexander Graham Bell
Sarah Bernhardt
Louis Braille
James Burke
Anders Celsius
Cheng Man-ch'ing
Charlie Christian
Ferdinand Eisenstein
Arline Feynman
W. C. Fields
Augustin-Jean Fresnel
Brenda Fricker
Abel Gance
Jay Gould
Emmett Hardy
Richard Harris
Doc Holliday
Immanuel Kant
Freddie Keppard
Ernie Kovacs
René Laënnec
Vivien Leigh
Christy Mathewson
Dmitri Mendeleev
James "Bubber" Miley
Barry Morse
N!xau
Anne Neville
Florence Nightingale
Mabel Normand
Etti Plesch
Joseph Mary Plunkett
Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe
Herman Potocnik
Gavrilo Princip
Jimmie Rodgers
Bernhard Riemann
Erwin Schrödinger
Takasugi Shinsaku
Okita Soji
Baruch Spinoza
Adrianus Turnebus
Georges Vezina
Félix Vicq-d'Azyr
Lev Vygotsky
Rube Waddell
William Winchester
Link Wray
Eugene Wigner
References
Rothman, Sheila M. (1994). Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History. ISBN 0801851866
Tuberculosis | World TB Day | Tuberculosis Education
History | Today | Famous People with Tuberculosis
Proclamations:
City of Seattle | King County | WA State
Washington’s Tobacco Control Report Card Grades Mixed
