A health librarian watching television: tuberculosis

I watched some of an interview with Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, who wrote Hancock's Half Hour, a 1960s comedy radio and television show which my Dad was a fan of, and Steptoe and Son, a 1970s television show which he definitely was not!

Both writers had been in a sanatorium, with TB, at the age of 18 or so, so I am guessing in the 1940s or 1950s - that was how they had met.

There were no antibiotics, so no treatment except bed rest.    The sanatorium where they were had a radio station, and its own newsletter.   The patients undertook work for outside organisations.

I've looked in PubMed to see what literature there is.   There is this article by Raymond Hurt in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, reproducing a diary kept by a patient in the 1940s, including accounts of pre-streptomycin treatments.

I did also find this study of admissions to a children's sanatorium between 1936 and 1954, in Stannington (not the one near where I live but one in Northumberland, England).  Other articles in that same supplement are about tuberculosis in older historical periods.

I also found this account in Hansard, from 1950.   

Tuberculosis, of course, is still a global health issue, and is a notifiable disease in the UK.

World TB Day

World TB Day is tomorrow, 24 March. More here, and there is also a blog. The theme carries on from last year and is "I am stopping TB".

Nobel Prize games

Discovered this through the Biotechniques Weekly Newsletter. There are some multimedia online games based on the discoveries that have been awarded Nobel Prizes. I have just spent too long on the Robert Koch and TB game - I did manage to stain the expectorant, look at under the microscope and see the bacteria, but very slowly. Your virtual guide is called Wilma, and she has a nice line in responses when you try to do something stupid like pick up the bench, or pour the expectorant down the sink. The games are at http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/ - the "Nobel Prize in..." links at the top of the screen link to more games too. They cover peace, literature and economics (world trade) as well as chemistry, physics, medicine - including malaria and DNA and the genetic code, as well as TB.

TB vaccine development

Richard Lehman's very readable Journal watch alerts me to this review in the Lancet, which looks at the immune responses which might be important, and at approaches to developing new vaccines. Start with this DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(08)61036-3

Bulletin of the WHO

The latest issue is a theme issue on tuberculosis, to coincide with a resolution on TB that is being considered by the World Health Assembly which is meeting now.

See the contents page of this issue here.

John Crofton

Issue 37 of the DFID magazine Developments has an article about Professor John Crofton, who is now 95, and has been working in tuberculosis research and treatment for 70 years. He devised the "Edinburgh Method", the combination of three drugs that was the standard treatment. The use of that regimen apparently led to TB being virtually wiped out in Edinburgh within 6 years.

Failure to comply with the course of treatment led to the development of multidrug resistant TB, which in turn has led to the development of extreme drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB).