World TB Day 2021: "It's time to get rid of TB"

139 years since Robert Koch discovered the bacteria that cause "tuberculosis"

Today, March 24, marks the anniversary of the discovery by German physician and bacteriologist Robert Koch of the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, which in ancient times baffled scientists and were unable to know its causes, paving the way for diagnosing this disease and treating those infected with it.

To commemorate this memory, this day was chosen as the World Day to Combat Tuberculosis, and it was celebrated for the first time on the same day of the same year in which the hut discovered the bacteria that cause the disease, which is March 24, 1882.

Koch was born on December 11, 1843 in Clausthal near Hanover, he studied Medicine in Göttingen at the hands of the German doctor Frederick Gustav Jacob, and he graduated in 1866, and then participated in the Franco-Prussian War where he later worked as a medical officer, and using very limited possibilities, he became one of the founders of bacteriology, in addition to Louis Pasteur, and worked as a doctor in many hospitals German and professor at the University of Berlin.

Koch himself discovered the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, which scientists in the past were unable to know its causes, and proved that this microbe can cause pathological changes in various parts of the body such as the throat, intestine and skin, and he was also able to extract tuberculin from the tuberculosis germ, which is the substance that is used. Even today, in diagnosing tuberculosis and determining whether a person is immune to the disease or has previously had it.

It was Koch's research on tuberculosis that led to his Nobel Prize.

And some still call the TB bacteria "gut bacilli."

Tuberculosis is one of the most infectious diseases that cause the death of a large number of people in the world, as it kills more than 4,500 people per day, and the emergence of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis poses a great threat to health security, as the World Health Organization has stated that there are 10.4 million People were infected with tuberculosis in 2017, and that 1.8 million people died from the disease in 2016, it is an infectious disease that spreads in societies suffering from poverty and marginalization, which includes immigrants, refugees, ethnic minorities, miners, and others who work and live in vulnerable environments This is apart from the elderly, women, and children who are marginalized in many settings.

According to the World Health Organization, tuberculosis is still the deadliest infectious disease in the world, causing daily deaths of more than 4,000 people and morbidity of nearly 30,000 others, knowing that it is a preventable and treatable disease.

It is estimated that nearly 58 million lives have been saved since 2000 thanks to global efforts to control TB.

In an effort to accelerate the tuberculosis response in countries to enable them to achieve the desired goals, heads of state met and made strong commitments to end the disease during the first-ever high-level meeting of its kind held by the United Nations in September 2018.

The theme of World TB Day 2021, which bears the slogan " It is time to get rid of tuberculosis, ”implies the provision of optimal treatments for people with tuberculosis lung disease on the urgent need to work to fulfill the commitments made by world leaders in order to join forces to find and treat all TB patients in the world, to ensure that no one is left behind.