History of Tuberculosis

History Of Tuberculosis

Consumption, phthisis, scrofula, Pott's disease, and the White Plague are all terms used to refer to tuberculosis throughout history. It is generally accepted that the microorganism originated from other, more primitive organisms of the same genus Mycobacterium. Contrary to previous findings stating that tuberculosis passed from other animals to humans, scientific research has revealed that tuberculosis passed from humans to other animals instead. Scientific work investigating the evolutionary origins of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex has concluded that the most recent common ancestor of the complex was a human-specific pathogen, which encountered an evolutionary bottleneck leading to diversification. Analysis of mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units has allowed dating of this Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex evolutionary bottleneck to approximately 40,000 years ago, which corresponds to the period subsequent to the expansion of Homo sapiens sapiens out of Africa. This analysis of mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units also dated the Mycobacterium bovis lineage as dispersing approximately 6,000 years ago, which may be linked to animal domestication and early farming. Human bones from the Neolithic show a presence of the bacteria although the exact magnitude (incidence and prevalence) is not known before the 19th century. Still, it is estimated that it reached its peak (with regard to the percentage of the population affected) between the end of the 18th century and the end of the 19th century. Over time, the various cultures of the world gave the illness different names: yaksma (India), phthisis (Greek), consumptione (Latin) and chaky oncay (Incan), each of which make reference to the "drying" or "consuming" affect of the illness, cachexia. Its high mortality rate among middle-aged adults and the surge of Romanticism, which stressed feeling over reason, caused many to refer to the disease as the "romantic disease."