English The burden of tuberculosis as a permanent medical and legal challenge for mankind through the centuries
Abstract
Tuberculosis (TB) is a contagious disease, throughout human history, permanently opens numerous medical and legal questions, for which the answers are implied by the current social circumstances.
In ancient times, insufficient knowledge of the etiopathogenesis of TB resulted in discrimination and isolation of patients. In the Middle Ages, kings used TB as a disease to secure their political power over the citizens, while TB culturally took a romanticized form during the 19th end 20th centuries, together with a great social phobia of contagion, disease, and dying on the other side. Stereotypes were formed around all TB victims, while society tried to understand the nature of the disease and establish a civilizational relationship, with it as a health problem with numerous social implications. Modern public health measures to control the TB pandemic established after the discovery of the Koch bacillus, the invention and mass use of the BCG vaccine, the discovery of streptomycin and isoniazid, and the new era of TB treatment, with the consequent emergence of drug resistance, co-epidemic with AIDS, neglect of public health facilities and the current COVID-19 pandemics, threaten the many legal rights of the infected and the sick and pose new challenges in its global elimination.
Numerous attempts by society over the centuries to devise preventive and therapeutic measures for TB, through different levels of social obligations and activities, have had and continue to have a profound impact on the human race, shaping its further response to the victims of this deadly disease.
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