Tuberculosis appeared on Earth three million years ago

There are medicines for almost every illness in the XXI century. However, some diseases still can be neither prevented nor cured. It is not only AIDS and cancer, but tuberculosis as well. Although the problem of mass consumption is practically solved in developed countries, there is still Third World left. Meantime, on the whole this disease mows down three million people yearly. Scientists cannot help but be concerned with the origins of the virus and its possible treatment. Finally, French researchers went public with the results of their scientific studies.

Scientists presume that the TB virus, which originated three million years ago in Eastern Africa, spread on the planet through people's migrations.

If the French scientists are right, it turns out that tuberculosis or consumption (as it was called in the XIX century) is much older than plague, typhus and malaria. It also means that even very remote ancestors of humans could have suffered from this disease. Besides, new discovery can help scientists in developing new medicine that will be able to cure and prevent the disease. The problem is that the virus quickly adjusts to the medicines, which are used to treat it.

Meanwhile, Canadian scientists from the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal managed to extract a gene that controls the speed of progress and course of tuberculosis. According to microbiologists every third person on the planet is infected with the virus, but only 5-10 percent of the carriers fall ill. And now specialists found the key that starts the mechanism of the disease.

Researchers directed their attention to the NRAMP1 gene, which is known to be closely related to many diseases, including those that are really different like leprosy and atrophic arthritis. It turned out that the variants of NRAMP1 gene control the speed of tuberculosis progress and also whether the disease will progress at all. "This is the first time a gene has been shown to control the time frame between initial infection and the disease," scientists pointed out.

For reference, tuberculosis is caused by the bacterium called Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The disease is characterized with the following symptoms: violent cough, loss of appetite, fever and heavy perspiration at nights.

Tuberculosis appeared on Earth three million years ago

Maybe. But its appearance in the U.S. has increased dramaticallly with the influx of immigrants from 3rd world countries across our porous borders. Also, the prevalence is dramatically increased in areas with very high incidence of AIDS because they have no immune system to fight it off.

No big deal, though. We are just one big global family .... right??? Mention either of these issues and you will be drummed out of town for being racist and homophobic. There IS NO PUBLIC HEALTH issue here - everyone can just move on.

Previous research of the virus's DNA showed that the disease had appeared 35 thousand years ago. However, French scientists studied a special type of bacterium that causes tuberculosis in Eastern Africa. Specialists draw the conclusion that the "southern" virus can be much older, with other types of bacterium originating from it.
Scientists presume that the TB virus, which originated three million years ago in Eastern Africa, spread on the planet through people's migrations.

Interesting ping

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Not to worry too much. Mycobacterium tuberculosis is essentially cosmopolitan. It is and will become more common as a pathogen in this country as it was once nearly extinguished as a disease in this country in all except alcoholic, but is making a comeback as illigal aliens stream across the border. We are starting to see some close kin to Mycobacterium tuberculosis with the leprosy organism now being found in this country as a clinical disease.

I used to work as a lab assistant when I was in undergraduate school and we cultured Mycobacterium avium, but never the tuberculosis organism.

I have found may people on routine Chest X-ray with calcified granulomas in the apex of the lung indicating a once active case now quiescent and calcified. Most of these patients are seropositive for TB.

"TB is spread through the air from one person to another. The bacteria are put into the air when a person with active TB disease of the lungs or throat coughs or sneezes. People nearby may breathe in these bacteria and become infected."

Here's a random but interesting story (I think) about a close encounter with TB and a near-miss blunder of medical practice: I had a very scary encounter with TB three years ago..... I was being treated for a serious bout of cancer in a major NYC hospital.... mostly as an out-patient, but they would destroy my immune system via chemotherapy, and a couple of times I had to be rushed to the ER with a serious fever ("neutropenic fever" they called it), and then admitted as an in-patient so they could put me in isolation and pump me full of major anti-biotics for a week or two.... anyway, one time at 5 am I'm brought from the ER upstairs to a hospital room, and it's not an isolation room (even though I have absolutely no immune system left). The other guy in the room is awake, hacking and coughing and gaggging worse than anything I've ever heard.... after a couple of hours of this I'm ready to scream at someone to get out, figuring that there must be something infectious in the air from all that coughing, when a Doctor comes by, looks at my chart, and rushes out of the room.... I hear all kinds of whispered commotion right out in the hallway, I can tell there's quite a fuss, and then the nurses and orderlies rush in and wheel me right out of there, without anyone saying a word.... now they give me about the most prime room in the hospital, a huge corner room with great window views of the East River and the city and it's a single, only one bed, so now I'm finally in isolation and in probably the best room in the hospital to boot. A little later I'm talking with one of the hospital staff one-on-one, and I ask what the h--- that was all about, why was I put in that other room with an obviously very sick patient when I was supposed to be in isolation due to having no immune system, and how did I now rate the fabulous room that looked like it must be for wealthy private patients paying some huge premium on the usual rates... anyway, I cajoled the real story out of her, swearing never to tell (this is anonymous, so it's OK), and she said that I had just been part of the worst medical blunder she'd ever seen, that the other patient was a late-stage HIV patient dying of AIDS, tuberculosis, and a couple of other things, and that it was the last room in the entire hospital that someone in my condition should have been put into, even temporarily. A doctor/resident making the first round freaked out when she realized what the night staff had done, probably some half-asleep nurse who admitted me without thinking about the charts.... Anyway, I may have breathed lots of TB spores or bacterium, but by this time they had me on IV major major major antibiotics, 3 different ones that I'd never even heard of (the kinds that are supposed to kill just about anything), so I survived (but I assume the other guy didn't).

Not just TB... a host of third-world-dirtbag diseases previously unknown in this country are on the rise due to... you guessed it! Third-world-dirtbag immigrants!!

Chagas disease... Dengue fever... etc... Most doctors, being liberals, won't admit it either, that would be politically incorrect of course. Better to treat it as a "Health Problem" - at least as long as it's not YOUR 14-year-old daughter dying of Bessarabian monkey-pox or whatever it is this week. (That usually wakes a liberal up... too late to save the rest of us from the depradations to which they subject us in their pathological state of denial of reality, of course...)

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