Professor Salome Charalambous

You can't just treat a person with that disease as if it's like you just got a bug that you're treating.

You're treating a person who has a whole lot of other things going on with them.

And you've got to understand how those work together.

So TB is caused by a germ, the germ we call mycobacterium tuberculosis.

And it really is spread when people breathe in droplets that have got TB in them.

Basically, what happens to a lot of us that live in a country with high rates of TB, including myself and especially healthcare workers, is that we breathe in these droplets very young, so as children.

And what happens is that the TB goes into your body and it actually forms what we call a gonfocus, which is a little like nodule in your lung.

And then later on in life, when your immune system is suppressed or you're under stress, or sometimes when you get reinfected by another TB bacillus, you can then develop what we call TB disease.

Yes.

And so that we call that active TB.

And active TB, usually people have a cough and the other classic symptoms are night sweats, sweating at night and weight loss.

But it can be that you can

also be completely asymptomatic.

So that's a new thing that we found out recently is that someone can have TB disease and at the beginning be asymptomatic.

In other words, doesn't have those classic symptoms of TB, but actually have it.

So that also causes us some problems sometimes in diagnosing TB in those people.

But those are the classic symptoms, cough, weight loss, and night sweats.

In some ways, it makes it a very interesting disease to study because there's so many different facets to it and so many difficulties that we face with identifying TB, treating TB.

This is a disease that's been around, that's been found in mummies.

So it's been around for 2000 years and yet we still haven't been able to control it.