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Canadian Health&Care Mall: Myths and Facts about Tuberculosis
With the pharmacology development, many serious diseases have ceased to be deadly. There are drugs and treatment methods to overcome almost any disease. But the problem of Bacterium Koch infection is relevant to this day. What do we know about this infectious disease? How to prevent it? Answers to these questions are easy to find on the Internet or other media. The main thing is to learn to distinguish fiction from fact.
Tuberculosis is a disease characterized by lung lesion, rarer – other internal organs or systems. Canadian Health&Care Mall researchers consider this disease one of the most ancient in the world. Archaeologists have found signs of this disease even in Egyptian mummies. In ancient Greece phthisis treatment (consumption, depletion) was considered meaningless and ineffective, but, fortunately, this pathology was quite rare. And in modern history tuberculosis epidemics extinguished millions of people’s lives. For example, in Europe of XVI – XVII centuries almost 20% of deaths were attributed to this particular disease.
«The real pain is never felt immediately. It is similar to phthisis: when a person notices first symptoms, this means that the disease has already reached almost the last stage» (Yukio Mishima)
The Japanese novelist and playwright is right that tuberculosis is difficult to diagnose at early stages. Often, it has almost no symptoms.
Canadian Neighbor Pharmacy: Discussion of Negative Acid-Fast Smears Needed To Adequately Assess Infectivity of Patients With Pulmonary Tuberculosis
Our findings suggest that index cases assessed with only two smear-negative sputum specimens can be considered no more infectious than cases with at least three smear-negative specimens. Previous studies have concentrated on the likelihood of a positive smear or culture in relation to the order of specimen collection. Craft and coworkers found no positive smears results after two AFB-negative sputum samples. Other investigators also found a low likelihood of the third smear being positive after a two negative results, ranging from 0.2 to 3.2%. Nelson et al, however, found that the probability of a smear being positive for AFB following two negative results was 13%. Telzak et al, using a different approach, investigated smear-positive cases who converted to consecutively negative smears after receiving effective therapy; only 4 of 100 cases had a repeatedly positive smear results after two negative specimens. None of the above or other investigations to our knowledge have examined the infection rates resulting from index cases in which less than three smears were collected.
In our study, we also found a high positive culture yield of the first two sputum specimens (90%), which is in agreement with other studies (93 to 99%).> Although not the focus of this study, a third sputum specimen may still be useful if a clinician wants to maximize the diagnostic yield of sputum specimens before embarking on more invasive testing such as bronchoscopy and lung biopsy.