Answers:
1. C. The main cause for tuberculosis is Mycobacterium tuberculosis, a small, aerobic bacillus. It affects the lungs, lymphatic, central nervous system and circulatory system among others. It can affect almost any tissue or organ of the body. When a person is infected with tuberculosis, the bacteria in the lungs multiply causing pneumonia. It causes chest pain, cough up blood and sustained cough.
2. C. The bacteria is spread in the air when an infected person coughs, shouts, sneezes or spits. A person who inhales such infected air gets affected with the tuberculosis bacteria. TB is not spread through contaminated food or transmission of blood.
3. D. The symptoms of TB depend on the part of the body that is infected.
a. Pulmonary TB causes pain in the chest, coughing up of blood and persisting cough.
b. Lymphatic TB causes pain in the neck and groin area.
c. Bone or joint TB can make the bones brittle and vulnerable for fracture, loss of movement in the bone or joint and weakness of bones.
d. Abdominal TB can cause abdominal pain, diarrhea, bleeding from anus or rectum.
4. A. Africa accounts for more than 29% of the global deaths occurring due to tuberculosis. More than half a million people die every year of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is becoming a major medical problem with India. Around 330,000 people die each year due to TB.
5. D. Mycobacterium tuberculosis causes TB.
6. A. Treatment usually combines several antibiotics, given for six to 12 months. It is important that patients take their medication on time every day. When patients stop taking their medication before the end of treatment, they risk having TB return. TB that returns may be resistant to drugs used to treat it, making it much more difficult to cure. If you have a positive skin test for TB, but no other signs of the disease, your doctor may ask you to take one antibiotic, usually rifampin, for nine months to kill any TB bacteria in your body and prevent development of active TB in the future.
7. B. If a full course of anti-tubercular drugs is taken on a regular basis, this disease is fully curable. A TB patient has to take medicines for a minimum period of six months continuously. The drugs may continue up to one year in some cases. It is important that the drugs are discontinued only on the advice of the doctor. Patients who do not take a complete treatment or take drugs on an irregular basis, their disease turns incurable or even life threatening.
8. A. If the body’s resistance is low due to infections, aging, malnutrition and other disease, the bacteria can break out of the tubercles and cause active tuberculosis
9. A. The number of TB cases began dropping in the 1940s and 1950s, when antibiotics were first used to treat the disease. But after 1985, the number of TB cases started to rise again. One factor was the AIDS epidemic. People with HIV infection are at high risk for developing active TB. People who must live in crowded homeless shelters are at higher risk for developing active TB. People who don’t finish their TB treatment are at risk for developing drug-resistant TB.
10. A. Bacillus Calmette-Guerin Vaccine. BCG vaccine provides immunity or protection against tuberculosis (TB). The vaccine may be given to persons at high risk of developing TB. In countries like India, where there are high rates of TB, BCG is given to infants as it prevents children from developing TB. Unfortunately, the positive effect of BCG in protecting infants and young children from endemic areas from the lethal forms of TB does not extend to the adult years. People develop active tuberculosis even though they received BCG, even in multiple doses, in earlier years. Since BCG has been used so widely and for such a long time, if it were effective it is unlikely that one third of the world’s population would now have TB infection and that two million people a year worldwide would die of TB.
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