CHILDREN SUFFERING FROM TUBERCULOSIS

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Tuberculosis, or mycobacterium tuberculosis, is a type of mycobacteria that commonly infects the lungs however in can also infect  your bones. TB can be latent, in which it is dormant, or it can be active, in which it causes symptoms and can be contagious and be very serious to the health of the victim.

The only treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis or “consumption” prior to the discovery of antibiotics was bed rest and fresh air. Doc Holiday, the famous gunman in the Nineteenth Century suffered from  TB and spent that last year of his life in bed while  breathing in clean air. Nevertheless, it was too late to save him so he invariably died from the infection in his lungs.

Sanitariums were designed to provide the conditions for a patient’s immune system to fight the TB infection on its own. In Toronto, if you were in the latent and early stages of tuberculosis you had a good chance of recovery if you were sent north to a sanitorium in Gravenhurst,  hat was in a  small town  that is north of Toronto.

The Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire was founded in 1900 in Fredericton, New Brunswick a province in eastern Canada.  Other areas of interest included immigration, child welfare, community health and social services. They built the first sanitarium in the world that treated children suffering from TB.  It was called, the Preventorium for Children suffering from TB.  It was built in Weston, a small village just west of the City of Toronto in the Province of Ontario.  Being sent to that particular sanitarium was a bad omen since it was apparent to everyone that the TB bugs were causing havoc in the lungs of the children that had been sent there.                                          

The “white plague” posed a real danger to everyone in Canada but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. it was particularly associated with the urban poor. William Gage, who had made a fortune in the printing of textbooks.—years later, I and nine other persons, compiled the Gage English Dictionary. Gage chose fighting TB the object of his philanthropy. In the 1890s, he spearheaded the creation of Canada’s first free sanitarium in Gravenhurst that is  a small town that is north of Toronto. The Muskoka Free Hospital for Consumptives people suffering from TB was built and the later the Weston hospital, was built to which in 1913 was added to the Queen Mary Hospital for Tubercular Children which was  later called the Preventorium for Tubercular Children. The policy was that no child suffering from TB would ever be turned away. It is obvious that the policy was welcomed putting the children in that hospital considering that TB is so contagious.

In 1938 when I was a five-year-old boy, my mother noticed that I was coughing up blood. She brought me to what was the original sick children’s hospital on College Street in in Toronto. The X-rays showed that I had what was called Bovine TB which was common with children since we were all drinking the milk from TB infected cows.   I had TB in my left lung which was painful when I coughed.  I was immediately sent to the Preventorium in Weston for treatment.

Twenty-one years later 1959, I met a woman who was a nurse in that sanitarium. She told me that she remembered me when I was a patient in that sanitarium. I must have been either a very good boy or a very bad boy for her to remember me in that sanitarium twenty one years earlier.

 We young patients certainly got a lot of bed rest and fresh air.  We went to bed at seven in the evening and got out of bed at seven in the morning. As to fresh air, we slept on a very wide porch on two sides of the building. There were no glass windows in in the porch but there were screens that kept the insects from attacking us and it also kept the rain and snow from us but not the bitter cold winter breezes. 

We slept in flannel pajamas, wore woolen caps that went below our ears and wore woollen mitts. We were also given a crocket container filled with hot water and covered with flannel and which we called a “pig” and placed it in our beds on the flannel sheets and when we pulled our heavy blankets over our heads, we were nice and warm. Of course, hours later, the water in the crockets were no longer hot or even warm so we just had to be content with the pig taking up space in our beds.                                             

One night in the winter, the factory that was right next to us had smoke and fire shooting out of its smokestack. The top of he short smokestack was level with us on the second floor of our building as the smoke and fire blew through the screens. The nurses woke us up and old us to go to the front of the building. When we were all outside standing in the snow and wrapped in our blankets, one of the nurses noticed that I wasn’t wearing my shoes. She ordered me to go back into the building and put my shoes on and then return to the front of the building. When I reach the second floor’s balcony, I was terrified since it was all filed with smoke. I found my bed and put on my shoes and then went out of the building. I can’t help but wonder if it was all that smoke that I had inhaled that destroyed the TB bugs swarming about in my left lung. In any case, a year later, it was determined that I was TB free so my mother came to the Preventorium and took me home.         

Considered to be one of oldest illnesses known to man, TB poses the gravest threat to the world’s youngest inhabitants. More than 1 million children are infected annually—from India to Indiana, Botswana to Brazil while becoming sick from this disease.  Although children under the age of 15 are among those most vulnerable, most diagnostic tests for TB are unable to identify their disease; most available treatments are ineffective for younger victims subsequently an estimated 20 percent of all children with the TB disease will die.

                         

As a result, childhood TB has been dubbed “the hidden epidemic” and with good reason. It has remained in the shadows for years and, in 2015, the WHO estimated that the true number of children living with TB infection is likely twice as high as previously thought.

Finding and treating children with TB is uniquely challenging. First, the disease manifests itself differently in children than it does in adults.  When children have TB in their lungs, there are fewer TB bacteria present, making it nearly invisible to current diagnostic methods. Additionally, really smaller children often cannot cough up the sputum samples needed to perform the diagnostic tests.      

Treatment for children is even more complicated. TB drugs are rarely designed for the young, and do not come in child-friendly forms, like liquids. They’re often not made or packaged in smaller doses, and have not been tested for child-specific side effects, safety, or effectiveness.

Addressing the worldwide TB epidemic among children demands a multi-faceted approach. It also requires innovation, collaboration, and commitment

At CDC, they are working side-by-side with local governments to better understand the burden of TB among children, so that they can develop the kinds of tools that can prevent infection and ensure a speedy cure for the millions of children who develop this potentially deadly disease.

In countries around the world, CDC is leading the the way to develop 

international pediatric TB guidelines and encouraging the  integration of TB screening into routine pediatric health care and scaling up TB treatment for children living and dying from the TB bugs eating away their lungs.

 

I hope that they are successful for the sake  of the children who are suffering pain in their lunges and for their parents who suffer anguish at the inevitable  loss of their children.