My first experience with TB was when I saw a patient in my second year of medical school. Emaciated and barely able to sit up, I wondered if he needed food or medicine first (he needed both). Later, in my clinical years, I remember another middle aged man, presenting with Tuberculosis of the spine - and my medicine prof telling our group that "you must never be narrow in your perspective when thinking about TB - it can affect almost any part of the human body." Of course, as with all of my batchmates at the time, I too have prescribed standard treatment protocols for TB numerous times. I had enjoyed it like every other branch of internal medicine and left it at that.
My second tryst with TB came because of my passion for immunology, where I ended up in Borstel, looking into sex differences in TB in the group of Bianca Schneider & working very closely with Jochen Behrends and Zane Orinska, my good friend Jay, along with other collaborators. To those who have the disease - it is frightening. Even when it can be cured most of the time (with access to adequate health care), its treatment is prolonged and draining to say the least - where treatments left midway translates to lost lives and the generation of a drug resistant bacterium. To those of us who study its immunology, TB is profound in its ability to adapt to our immune system - it's defences. For me, TB has been a great teacher to understand the complexities of our immune system (where my fascination lies). It made me fully appreciate that for an organism to evade our immune defences and to successfully establish itself, it is not necessary that it must always succeed; in fact, the bacterium has adapted itself to fail most of the time - to initiate a complex communication with our immune system, to lie in wait for the "right" opportunity to establish itself - much like the old adage that "winning the war does not mean winning every battle". Such qualities have made the bacterium, once established, very very difficult to rid. In order that we continue to efficiently develop therapies and vaccines for TB, it is essential that we must first understand the vulnerabilities in our own armour that Mtb so very elegantly, fascinatingly exploits. It's as much a teacher of our own biology as it is in being the most dreaded infectious disease killer on the planet - taking about a million and a half lives each year.
#WorldTBday
Krankheits- und Todesfälle, die durch mehrfach wirkstoffresistente #Tuberkuloseerreger ausgelöst werden, nehmen in vielen Weltregionen zu. Das Forschungszentrum Borstel, Leibniz Lungenzentrum unterstützt den Kapazitätsaufbau in Ländern mit hohen TB-Zahlen durch die Implementierung modernster Technologien #WorldTBDay #Welttuberkulosetag
