Did anyone watch American Experience this week? "The Forgotten Plague"

[Hestia]

By the dawn of the 19th century, the deadliest killer in human history, tuberculosis, had killed one in seven of all the people who had ever lived. The disease struck America with a vengeance, ravaging communities and touching the lives of almost every family. The battle against the deadly bacteria had a profound and lasting impact on the country. It shaped medical and scientific pursuits, social habits, economic development, western expansion, and government policy. Yet both the disease and its impact are poorly understood: in the words of one writer, tuberculosis is our "forgotten plague."

Holy crap! TB has been with mankind since the beginning. The ancient Greeks are the one's who called it consumption. It could take 30-40 years to die of TB.

I cannot highly praise this show - show much information, especially about the early Public Health systems and the draconian ways they had of coming in and just taking people from their homes. Bellevue ran out of space for TB patients and put them on barges on the Hudson River.

The shows talks to patients who had to go to Sanatoriums and their lives during those times.

[Galileo126]

1. Yes, a very good Am-Exp

I knew a little about the sanatoriums, but not as much as I learned from this show. And barges!?! I never knew about that! Thanks for the scientific method and the testing of hypotheses for coming up with a cure for TB. But, there is still more to go since the latest strains of TB don't respond anymore to streptomycin.

I'm never disappointed with anything The American Experience does. A top-notch series, for sure.

[Hestia]

2. Here is a blog post from one of the virologists on the show at aired:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/blog/2015/02/10/plague-worldwide-epidemic/

The move to suburban living and the development of active public health programs have reduced the burden of tuberculosis -- a serious, sometimes fatal infectious disease of the lungs -- in many affluent countries. Many of us, however are not so lucky and are still faced with the ugly specter of TB which was so eloquently portrayed in the recent American Experience documentary, The Forgotten Plague.

Why is the “Forgotten Plague” still such a threat outside of the US and Europe? One of the principal issues is the sheer size of the problem. There are over 3 billion people who harbor the bacterium that causes TB, and while most will remain healthy, determining which of these 3 billion will develop the disease is – at the moment – not feasible. So countries with high burdens of disease are faced with making the decision of whether to treat those who are sickest, or to try and treat all of those who are infected. Of course, those who are sickest take most of the resources leaving a multitude of potential TB cases waiting to develop.

A second major issue is the length of treatment required to eliminate the bacterium that causes disease. The drugs that work against TB are not regular antibiotics; three months is required for even the minimum treatment and we all know how easy it is to stop taking antibiotics once you feel better, imagine keeping on with the treatment for 3-6 months. So compliance is an additional issue. The bacteria causing TB also develop drug resistance and so we need to take two or three drugs together. Even when the lengthy drug treatment is adhered to, drug resistance can develop, and this plunges us back into the pre-antibiotic era so harrowingly portrayed in The Forgotten Plague.

[more at link]

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I was in shock when I watched the show because you just don't hear about TB so much anymore unless it deals with Africa. There, citizens are forced to take the full course of antibiotics to help stop the spread.

I had no idea how long TB has been with humankind! You always hear about leprosy/Hanson's Disease but never the age of TB. I found it interesting too in light of today's outbreaks of preventable diseases happening today. How would we act if a TB epidemic today? We certainly don't have the sanatorium's available and who wants to go live in a warehouse? You must admit the sanatoriums fed them well, in thinking that fresh nutritious food would help combat the disease, which in large part probably did help. They didn't know about immune system response but were aware of something like it when they prescribed nutritious food and plenty of sun and fresh air.

Who knew that porches on houses came about from TB because of the fresh air prescriptions? And the raising of skirts and the waning of beards? So much changed publicly (for ill and for good) after the discovery of the bacterium.

This is one of AE better shows IMNSHO

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. Two things fostered the spread of TB in the old days:

1. They didn't know what caused it for a long time, so even after the cause was discovered, there were a lot of active cases from before.

2. Crowded living conditions. If you've seen the way immigrants in the major cities lived in the early 20th century, you'll understand why it spread and why one of the early hypotheses was that TB was hereditary. (If the family lived in one room, they would all get it eventually.)

Epidemic TB was just dying out when I was a kid. We received immunizations and the like through the school system, and one thing we were required to take every couple of years was a tuberculin test, which tests you for antibodies to TB.

My mother was a kindergarten teacher in a small town, and one little girl who was one of 13 children living in a regular sized house (i.e. really crowded) was diagnosed with active TB. It just so happened that she was diagnosed the day after I had visited my mother's classroom (our respective school systems had different days off) and had played with the students. We and everyone in the class had to have tuberculin tests. Fortunately, mine and my mother's came back negative, and so did the tests given all the other students.

[Hestia]

4. Very true and is addressed by the program. TB hasn't been fully eradicated and as stated on the

virologists blog post, over 3 billion carry an active strain of it, they don't know who will get or spread it. I saw a program where in Africa you are taken by gun point to the clinic to get your antibiotics. Even when you do take your antibiotics, there is huge anti-drug resistance within the community.

[Jenoch]

5. I would like to see this show on a rerun.

There was a TB sanatorium a few blocks up the hill from our house in a small, rural farming community. It had been converted into a residential facility for children with handicaps. This was long before such children were mainstreamed into the public schools.