Experts allay fears: TB is not easily spread

Officials told him they would prefer he didn't fly, but no one ordered him not to, he said.

Tuberculosis facts

• Tuberculosis, or TB, is most common in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Russia.

• TB is a contagious disease spread through the air like the common cold, though more direct contact is necessary.

• Someone in the world is newly infected with TB bacilli every second.

• More than one-third of the world's population has the TB bacterium in their bodies.

• One in 10 latent infections progresses to active TB disease.

• Left untreated, each person with active TB disease will infect on average 10 to 15 people every year.

• People with HIV and TB infection are much more likely to develop TB.

• In the United States, TB is most prevalent in jails and prisons, homeless shelters, migrant farm camps and some nursing homes.

• More than 14,000 TB cases were reported in the United States in 2004.
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• Tuberculosis has also been known as consumption, phthisis (Greek for consumption), wasting disease, white plague and Pott's disease.

• Greek physician Hippocrates, born about 460 B.C., identified tuberculosis as the most widespread disease of his time. Evidence of TB has also been found in Egyptian mummies and the remains of prehistoric animals.

• The bacillus causing tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, was first identified in 1882 by Robert Koch, who received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1905 for the discovery.

• The first vaccine for TB was developed at the Pasteur Institute in France between 1905 and 1921. The first of several drugs currently used to treat TB was developed in the 1940s.

• The Christmas Seals promotion began in Denmark in 1904 as a fund-raiser for tuberculosis programs.

Sources: Centers for Disease Control, World Health Organization, The Merck Manual online, Wikipedia

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Contributing: Associated Press

E-mail: lois@desnews.com; sfidel@desnews.com