Chapter 9 in Diseases and Human Evolution discusses tuberculosis in humans and cattle. The first thing that comes to mind when I think of tuberculosis is the visits to the veterinarian whenever we wanted to cross state lines with livestock from our farm. Though Arizona is considered a tuberculosis free state, New Mexico is not. Even though our livestock was coming out of a TB free state, we still were required to take our goats to the vet and have blood draws done. The chapter reminded me of the relevance of tuberculosis in society today, both in livestock and humans, and how it is still a disease we are struggling to control in some countries, even though it has been around for several thousand years. One evolutionary mechanism made itself very clear while reading the chapter: the mycobacteria that causes tuberculosis can live outside of a host cell because of its lipid capsule. Barnes said that it can survive without a host for …show more content…
This has happened a variety of times throughout evolutionary history, like with seals and sea otters. Based on the genetic research done, it is believed tuberculosis coevolved with ancient hominids. This coevolution would have allowed the mycobacteria to always develop new mechanisms to overcome our immune systems. This is a great explanation as to why tuberculosis is still an issue in human populations. We have not managed to eradicate the disease, and I think this coevolution is why. When a disease is evolving as a species is, it makes sense that we developed ways to harbor it without showing symptoms. Barnes said that if twenty people are exposed, five to ten people will contract it, but only one or two will show symptoms. From that, I take that the coevolution has allowed humans to handle exposure better than we do with other
Bacterial pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis causes tuberculosis a complex granulomatous disease which is a global health concern. It is a very slow growing bacteria, thus is extremely time consuming to culture in laboratory. It can survive the attack of the immune arsenal of our body; can successfully hide inside the macrophage. This makes long periods of uninterrupted antibiotic treatment necessary for the patients with tuberculosis and contributes to drug resistance very quickly [WHO 2014]. All this poses an extreme challenge to the scientists and the medical community to develop effective drug, monitor and treat this disease across globe. Before the discovery of anti-tubercular drugs, this disease was one of the most dreaded diseases. In absence of any drugs the only form of treatment recommended was healthy diet, rest and fresh air. Patients were sent to Tuberculosis sanatorium hoping that they might survive. The origin of this pathogen is traced back to Africa around 70,000 years ago and they successfully coevolved with humans as they migrated out of Africa and settled across the globe. Nearly 10,000 years ago there was a sudden change in human demography and the human population density increased suddenly, this is termed as Neolithic Demographic Transition. Genomic data of Mycobacterium across
The Department of Human Service (DHS) is a national or sub national umbrella agency that was set into place to provide public assistance in different cities and regions across America (U.S. Department of Human Services, [DHS], 2011). According to Dr. Raquel Hatter, Commissioner of Tennessee, the DHS Mission Statement is; “To improve the well-being of Tennesseans who are economically disadvantaged, vulnerable or living with disabilities through a network of financial, employment, protective and rehabilitative services” (DHS, 2011). In this observation we are going to take a look at DHS in the state of Tennessee, as well as what DHS offers within their system. We will also take a look at how DHS relates to, and implements the empowerment
As the second part of this reflection paper, I selected a book ‘A Short History of Disease’ by Sean Martin. He is a writer and filmmaker also known for his other famous books like The Knights Templar, Alchemy and alchemists, the Gnostics. His films include Lanterna Magicka: Bill Douglas & the secret history of cinema. The most alluring thing which conceives me to cull this book is a history of the disease, as a medical professional, it's always tantalizing to know from where all these begins and this book reaches up to my expectations as it started from the first ever recorded disease in the history of mankind. He isn’t lying when he say this a history of the disease. He starts from the earliest bacteria to evolve on the earth, long before there was anything around to infect. This book is divided into seven chapters, each chapter describes the history of diseases in a particular era. Chapter One: Prehistory, Chapter Two: Antiquity, Chapter Three: The Dark and Middle Ages, Chapter Four: The New World, Chapter
Tuberculosis is considered to be another surfacing disease. According to the Institute of Medicine, they believe the sole reason of the resurgence of tuberculosis is the increase in immunosuppressed populations. In industrialized countries, peoples
Tuberculosis has been part of human history for a long time but how long is a long time? Recent research using genetic data has allowed us to know that the tuberculosis progenitor has been on this planet for about 3 million years affecting even our earlier ancestors (Gutierrez et al, 2005). Additionally this research showed that the bacilli from tuberculosis are capable of mixing sections of their genome with other strains and giving the pathogen a composite assembly, which resulted from ancient horizontal exchanges before its clonal expansion. This quality provided tuberculosis a big advantage that even now a days allows the organism to evade, adapt and create resistance to treatments that were once successful. In order to fix current and
“Tuberculosis (TB), a multisystem disease with myriad presentations and manifestations, is the most common cause of infectious disease–related mortality worldwide. Although TB rates are decreasing in the United States, the disease is becoming more common in many parts of the world. In addition, the prevalence of drug-resistant TB is increasing worldwide. TB is caused by M tuberculosis, a slow-growing obligate aerobe and a facultative intracellular parasite. The organism grows in parallel groups called cords (as seen in the image below). It retains many
Chapter 10 of Disease and Human Evolution discusses leprosy. What initially stood out to me is that leprosy isn’t actually the official name of the disease. It was renamed Hansen’s Disease after Dr. Hansen, who discovered the real cause of leprosy. This is where I saw the first evolutionary mechanism. The mycobacterium that causes leprosy, Mycobacterium leprae, can shed its cell wall. This allows it to adapt to a variety of environments, including our body, allowing it to infect as many individuals as possible. I think this is a great example of part of the evolutionary synthesis, that heritable variation will be systematically biased. This says that variation will be biased towards adaptive and well-integrated variants. This mycobacterium certainly did that in evolving the mechanism to shed its cell wall so it can integrate into any organism’s system. I also found it incredibly interesting that this bacteria can also infect armadillos of all animals. While Barnes also discussed that chimpanzees and monkeys can be infected, it stood out to me that armadillos specifically can be infected, as we typically just learn about livestock and non-human primates can be infected with the disease.
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Tuberculosis, TB (tubercle bacillus) or MTB (mycobacterium tuberculosis) is a widespread, and in numerous cases fatal, communicable disease produced by a variety of forms of mycobacteria. The disease is distributed within the air when individuals who are infected with active TB infection sneeze, cough, or pass on breathing fluids throughout the air. Generally infections are asymptomatic, meaning they feel or show no symptoms, and dormant, but then again approximately one in ten dormant infections in the long run move on to the active disease. If left untouched, active TB is fatal to more than half of those infected.
Tuberculosis (TB) is a CDC (Centers for Disease Control) notifiable disease which is caused by an infectious bacterium that was discovered by a man named Robert Koch in 1882. This infectious bacterium that causes Tuberculosis is called Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), and is also known as Koch 's Bacillus. According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (2015), Mtb is a small, slow-growing bacterium that can live only in people. It is not found in other animals, insects, soil, or other non-living things. Mtb is an aerobic bacterium, which means
In many cases, Mycobacterium tuberculosis usually develops because of inconsistent consumptions of drugs. Most of the time, most people don’t even know they are infected until symptoms occur because this pathogen is easily transmitted through air exchange (Medline Library, 2005). Although this pathogen usually remains inactive even when it is in the immune system, it becomes
Tuberculosis (TB) is infectious disease caused by bacterial pathogens from Mycobacterium tuberculosis Complex. Tuberculosis affects various organs of the body forming granulomas at the site of infection. The pulmonary TB is the most common form (Anon, 2015).Only the pulmonary form is infectious with aerosol transmission after a sneeze or cough from an infected individual. Once an individual is infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis Complex, clinically, it can either lead to a TB infection (Latent/Inactive TB) or an Active TB. In TB infection, the bacteria reside in the body in an inactive state without causing any symptoms or being contagious. This is due to the immune system of the body which prevents the bacteria from multiplying and causing local damage in the body. The active TB is contagious and is characterized by the common clinical symptoms like, prolonged cough with or without blood and sputum (weeks-months), unintentional weight loss, chronic fatigue, low grade fever (on and off for weeks-months), and night sweats. A Latent TB can become active if there is a compromise in the immune system of the body. The time period between infection and clinical symptoms vary from weeks to years again depending upon the immune system of the body. In vulnerable groups, the symptoms appear after a few months of infection (Mayoclinic.org, 2015).
Tuberculosis is among the fatal diseases that are spread through the air. It’s contagious, meaning that it spreads from one infected individual to another, and at times it spreads very fast. In addition to being contagious, the disease is an opportunist infection as it takes advantage of those with weak defense mechanism, and especially the ones with terminal diseases like HIV and AIDS. Tuberculosis is therefore among the major concerns for the World Health Organization due to its contagious nature (World Health Organization 1).
TB has been found to come from the genus Mycobacterium. It was first thought that through the taming and keeping of cattle around 10,000-25,000 years ago allowed the bacteria to transfer from the livestock and infect humans. This would be where the bacteria would grow and evolve in the new host and become close to the bacterial species that we see today that can develop into Tuberculosis (Smith, 2003). Although, further research has shown
Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which has possibly caused more fatalities than any other microbial pathogen, has a long-standing worldwide history. Research has shown that an early precursor of the bacteria may have been present in East Africa as long as three million years ago. The current form of Mycobacterium tuberculosis is thought to be a descendant from a bacterium that existed about 20,000 to 15,000 years ago, but the variety of tuberculosis forms present today probably appeared between 250 and 1,000 years ago. Historical evidence for the presence of tuberculosis in ancient times can be obtained through certain skeletal abnormalities that are associated with tuberculosis. For example, Egyptian mummies dating over 5,000 years old have been found to contain the Pott’s deformity (Daniel, 2006). This deformity entails a compressed and deformed spinal cord that results from progressed