Ticking time bomb

Tedious, painful and less effective: the treatment of multiple resistant tuberculosis germs is difficult. Experts are alarmed, because the epidemic is spreading at a frightening pace. More than 10,000 pills - that's what a person has to swallow for years, who has become infected with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (TB).

Ticking time bomb

Tedious, painful and less effective: the treatment of multiple resistant tuberculosis germs is difficult. Experts are alarmed, because the epidemic is spreading at a frightening pace.

More than 10,000 pills - that's what a person has to swallow for years, who has become infected with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (TB). That's up to 20 tablets a day. There are also eight months of daily, painful injections. And the treatment has serious side effects. They range from severe nausea and body aches, skin rashes to deafness. Even psychoses can trigger the medication - and in the worst case, drive the patients into suicide.

As toxic as it is, the therapy is so expensive: Treating a multidrug-resistant TBC germ costs around $ 4,000. That's 50 times more than the treatment of a non-resistant TBC. Despite this enormous expense and its toxicity, the chemical club is only effective for every second patient.

Propagation of resistant germs

If one looks only at Germany, the danger initially seems small: 4,220 tuberculosis cases were reported to the Robert Koch Institute in 2012, of which 65 were multi-drug resistant. Globally, things are looking dramatically more dramatic: 450,000 people worldwide already suffer from multidrug-resistant germs each year. In some areas, such as Kazakhstan, every third new disease is already caused by the difficult-to-treat pathogens. Especially in poor and remote regions, it is difficult to reach the sick and to stay in line for long enough. A circumstance that fuels the formation of further resistance.

"What is alarming is that the vast majority of sufferers go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed," says Petros Issakides, epidemiologist at Médecins Sans Frontières in Mumbai. "These patients are either not treated at all or ineffective. This further aggravates the epidemic and aggravates the situation. "Thus, there is an ever-larger gap between the number of patients and those who can be successfully treated - the disease continues to spread unchecked.

New drugs are urgently needed

For a long time tuberculosis was almost defeated: the antibiotics worked well. Because of this, there was little interest in developing new drugs. This is now taking its revenge. After all: For the first time in more than 40 years, two new active ingredients are in the pipeline, which have the potential to radically improve the chances of recovery: Bedaquilin and Delamanid. "This is a sign of hope for hundreds of thousands of patients worldwide, where the usual drugs do not work," believes Philipp Frisch, coordinator of the drug campaign of "Doctors Without Borders" in Germany.

For a really effective treatment but a cocktail of at least four new drugs needed. And more importantly, find an effective vaccine against TB. But here is no breakthrough in sight. "The problem is not in the future, we are dealing with it here and now. The multidrug-resistant tuberculosis has already spread too far. The danger is too great to sit back and wait, "says Grania Brigden, TBC consultant for" Médecins Sans Frontières ".

Also in the West a problem

TBC will not be a problem for poorer countries: Sooner or later, multidrug-resistant infections will increasingly emerge in the industrialized nations. The disease is already spreading in conurbations such as London among less well-treated people. And those who live together in close quarters - homeless people, undocumented people, people with drug problems, prisoners. And since tuberculosis spreads like flu over the air, it is only a matter of time before it gains ground in the West.

Genenikele, a patient from "Doctors Without Borders" from Swaziland who has since died of TBC, put it in a nutshell: "Anyone can get tuberculosis - whether rich or poor. And if it gets you, there's hardly any way to stop the disease. "

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    Bacteria as pathogens

    March 24 is World Tuberculosis Day. How dangerous is the disease really? Tuberculosis is caused by bacteria. This has one major advantage: unlike viral diseases, the disease can be effectively treated with antibiotics. And there is also a vaccine. However, this was discontinued in 1998 in Germany, because only very few fell ill. For a long time, tuberculosis was no longer an issue in this country. But that changes.

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    Worldwide pathogens

    Our world has moved closer together. That means there is a lively international exchange. This has many advantages. However, diseases can spread more widely through travelers. This includes tuberculosis. However, most cases have been detected among refugees over the past two years. That is why all people who flee to Germany are tested for lung disease and, if necessary, treated quickly.

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    Clarify bloody cough quickly

    Even though the number of cases has increased continuously since 2014 - from 4522 in Germany to 5939 last year - Germany is a country with a very low tuberculosis risk. But again, if you suffer from a cough that lasts more than three weeks, you should have it checked out by your doctor. This is especially true in bloody ejection.

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    droplet infection

    Tuberculosis is transmitted via droplet infection. This means that when a tuberculosis patient coughs, the coughing droplets may also contain pathogens that can infect others. However, only patients with so-called open pulmonary tuberculosis are infectious, writes the Robert Koch Institute. For the rest, the foci are encapsulated and no bacteria on the breath.

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    Low risk of infection

    In contact with infectious tuberculous patients, the patient and contact persons should wear an oral nasal protection. Overall, however, the risk of getting tuberculosis is very low. Thus, only 5 to 15 percent of adults get ill if they have been infected with the virus. Children and adolescents under the age of 15 are at greater risk - from 20 to 40 percent of them. This also applies to people with weakened immune systems.

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    Multi-resistant germs

    Tuberculosis is usually treatable well. Of concern, however, are diseases that are triggered by multidrug-resistant pathogens. Multi-drug resistance means that a pathogen is immune to various antibiotics. The treatment is then complex and necessary for a long time.

Ticking time bomb

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❓ Is a ticking time bomb meaning?

👉 : a person or situation that will probably become dangerous or harmful in the future. He's a time bomb getting ready to explode. If we don't do something about the pollution problem, we'll be sitting on a ticking time bomb.

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👉 The ticking bomb scenario has come to be understood both as a matter of objective fact and as a potential actuality and, in contrast, as a deceptive and fantastical construct for considering the use and justification of torture, as it professes to describe a situation that would rarely, if ever, manifest in reality.

❓ What is the ticking time bomb for the environment?

👉 The authors argue that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from human activity will remain in the atmosphere and continue to affect the Earth's climate for tens to hundreds of thousands of years.

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👉 In computer software, a time bomb is part of a computer program that has been written so that it will start or stop functioning after a predetermined date or time is reached.

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👉 Example sentences ticking time bomb

  1. Men are walking around like ticking time bombs, completely oblivious to the danger they face.
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❓ What's another word for time bomb?

👉 What is another word for time bomb?

tinderboxvolcano
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imperilmentproblem
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❓ How does the philosophy of utilitarianism portrayed in this movie Unthinkable?

👉 Those principles are depicted through two ways. From the verbal data, the debate appearing on the dialogue between characters reveals Utilitarianism principles used to justify whether an action is right or wrong. From the visual data, the Utilitarianism events are pictured dramatically as morally unaccepted actions.

❓ What is the methane time bomb?

👉 The “methane time bomb” is the popular shorthand for the idea that the thawing of the Arctic could at any moment trigger the sudden release of massive amounts of the potent greenhouse gas methane, rapidly accelerating the warming of the planet.

❓ Can nuclear weapons expire?

👉 Given enough time, all radioactive elements will turn into uselessly stable elements like lead. As for fusion weapons, those that rely on deuterium-tritium fusion have the problem that tritium will decay rather rapidly into He3, which is harmful to a fusion reaction. Parts of a nuclear weapon have expiration dates.

❓ Can old ww2 bombs still explode?

👉 Known as military ordnance, these devices can remain intact for decades but explode without notice. They are highly dangerous, and only a trained bomb technician should handle them.

❓ What is a walking time bomb?

👉 Meaning: A person whose behaviour is erratic and totally unpredictable is a walking time-bomb.


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