Common symptoms of TB disease include:
• Prolonged cough
• Chest pain
• Weakness or fatigue
• Weight loss
• Fever
• Night sweats
Often, these symptoms will be mild for many months, thus leading to delays in seeking care and increasing the risk of spreading the infection to others.
If the healthcare provider suspects a patient to have TB disease, they will send the patient for testing. In the case of suspected lung TB disease, patients will be asked to give a sputum sample for testing for TB bacteria. For non-lung TB disease, samples of affected body fluids and tissue can be tested. WHO recommends rapid molecular diagnostic tests as initial tests for people showing signs and symptoms of TB. Other diagnostic tools can include sputum smear microscopy and chest X-rays.
With TB infection, a person gets infected with TB bacteria that lie inactive in the body. This infection can develop into TB disease if their immune system weakens. People with TB infection do not show any signs or symptoms of TB. To identify TB infection, healthcare providers will screen at-risk patients to rule out active TB, and they may use a skin or blood test to check for TB infection.
Tuberculosis
TB is caused by bacteria (Mycobacterium tuberculosis) and it most often affects the lungs. TB is spread through the air when people with lung TB cough, sneeze or spit. A person needs to inhale only a few germs to become infected.
Every year, 10 million people fall ill with tuberculosis (TB). Despite being a preventable and curable disease, 1.5 million people die from TB each year – making it the world’s top infectious killer.
TB is the leading cause of death of people with HIV and also a major contributor to antimicrobial resistance.
Most of the people who fall ill with TB live in low- and middle-income countries, but TB is present all over the world. About half of all people with TB can be found in 8 countries: Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines and South Africa.
About one-quarter of the world’s population is estimated to be infected by TB bacteria. Only 5-15% of these people will fall ill with active TB disease. The rest have TB infection but are not ill and cannot transmit the disease. Both TB infection and disease are curable using antibiotics.
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