Oscar Peterson was a happy child, the son of Norwegian immigrants who moved to the Minnesota frontier at the end of the nineteenth century. However , his happy childwood was short-lived. His mother soon became very ill, with incessant coughing, chest pains, and high fevers. She had tuberculosis (TB), a dreaded disease caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis. TB is highly contagious because M.tuberculosis is transmitted via aerosolized droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes. The disease was often fatal because there was no effective treatment at the time. Fresh air was prescribed, so the Peterson family slept with the windows open, even during the cold winter months. Because TB is so contagious, families with the disease lived in almost total isolation. Their friends were afraid to visit for fear of contracting the disease. When Oscar was 14 years old, his mother died, and life changed immediately. He quit school so that he could take care of his three younger brothers while his dad worked.
Thousands of frontier families like the Petersons fought to survive the scourge of TB in the first part of the twentieth century. Then Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, and a revolution in the treatment of bacterial diseases followed. During the 1940s and 1950s, scientists discovered an arsenal of highly effective antibiotics. As a result, the incidence of TB decreased sharply in the United States during the 1970s. Indeed, many physicians thought that TB might be totally eliminated. Unfortunately, they were wrong.
On November 16, 1991, a headline in the New York Times stated ‘ A Drug-Resistant TB Results in 13 Deaths in New York Prisons.’ Then, a prison guard in syracuse was killed by the same drug-resistant strain of M.tuberculosis as the prisoners, and, unfortunately, this drug-resistant strain was just the tip of iceberg. Today, many strains of M.tuberculosis are resistant to not just one or two antibiotics, but to a whole battery of drugs and antibiotics. These multi-drug-resistant (MDR) bacteria are present throughtout the world, with especially high frequencies in china ,India, Russia, and in prisons from New York to Siberia.
How serious a threat does the evolution of MDR bacteria pose to human health? Dr. Lee Reichman, on of the world’s leading expert on TB, has reffered to MDR-M, TUBERCULOSIS as a “timebomb”. World, 2 billion people (15 million in the United states) are infected with latent M.tuberculosis. Of these, 8.4 million develop active TB and 2 million die every year. Most of these cases of TB are currently treatable with antibiotics. However, imagine the enormity of the crisis if MDR-M. tuberculosis becomes widespread. Should we begin taking steps to avoid such crisis now –before the “timebomb” explodes?