Topic spans: 1943 - 2001
Tuberculosis: Old Disease, Continuing Threat
The "rest cure" – an extended stay in a sanatorium, or TB hospital, away from home and family – was the only hope for tuberculosis patients in the first half of the 20th century. Then came a cure for the dreaded lung disease: powerful antibiotics that made the sanatorium a thing of the past. But TB was far from eradicated, and new drug-resistant strains surfaced in the 1980s, threatening vulnerable groups such as the urban poor and northern aboriginals. Now, over half of new TB cases in Canada are found in newcomers, and Canadian scientists are at the forefront of new treatments for the disease.
Image of Tuberculosis patient x-ray from US Department of Health and Human Services
10 television clips
7 radio clips
TB resurfaces in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside
Broadcast Date: Dec. 5, 1984
Social worker Arlene Jackson has tuberculosis; one of 20 new cases of TB reported in Vancouver this year. She contracted it from a client who lives in the Downtown Eastside, the city's poorest neighbourhood. Doctors are concerned about an increase in TB among natives, immigrants and poor residents of the area. But, Jackson contends in this CBC news report, the problem is getting attention only now that a middle-class person is affected — her.TB resurfaces in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside
• By the late 1970s the rate of tuberculosis in Canada had decreased so dramatically that virtually all sanatoria were shut down for lack of patients. The phenomenon was aptly described by the title of Dr. G.J. Wherret's 1977 book about TB in Canada: The Miracle of the Empty Beds.• In 1941 the mortality rate (deaths per 100,000) of tuberculosis was 53.5. In 1971, when antibiotics were in use for over 20 years, the rate had fallen to 2.1.
• In the mid-1980s the rate of TB infection stopped declining and was levelling off with about 2,000 new cases each year.
• There were two explanations for the end of the decline: strains of TB that were increasingly resistant to drugs, and immigration by people from countries where TB was not yet under control.
• People living in poverty or in homeless shelters are especially vulnerable to infection by tuberculosis for a number of reasons. Their immune systems are often compromised due to poor nutrition or other infections; they may be living in crowded, unventilated spaces that allow TB bacteria to spread; and they may have had a previous exposure to the disease and gone untreated or failed to take all the drugs required to kill all the TB bacteria in their bodies.
• The chances of a healthy person contracting TB in a public place are virtually nil. It usually takes repeated exposures to a person with active TB before the bacteria take hold in the lungs. Even then, the TB is likely to remain dormant in the healthy person's body.
TB resurfaces in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside
Medium: Television
Program: The National
Broadcast Date: Dec. 5, 1984
Guest(s): John Blatherwick, Arlene Jackson, Jim Preveau
Host: Knowlton Nash
Reporter: Georges Tremel
Duration: 2:12
Last updated:
Sept. 12, 2003
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17 clips in this topic . page
Radio
3:15
March 7, 1949
Polio patients from Canada's North are flown in for treatment.
Radio
14:01
The CBC Stamp Club broadcasts from a children's hospital in 1950, cheering up some young stamp collectors suffering from tuberculosis.
TB resurfaces in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
The CBC Digital Archives Website.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Last updated: Sept. 12, 2003.
[Page consulted on Feb. 13, 2012.]