For most people in the United States, the only awareness of tuberculosis (TB) may be the skin patch test required to work or volunteer in schools or health care facilities. But that could change during the pandemic.
TB is considered a disease caused by a bacterium—Mycobacterium tuberculosis—that usually attacks the lungs, but can attack any part of the body. Not everyone infected becomes sick, so two stages of infection exist: a latent phase when people are asymptomatic, and an active phase when they develop symptoms and become ill.
But TB has a worrisome connection to the novel coronavirus. For someone with latent TB, contracting COVID-19 could activate the bacterium, potentially leading to an accelerated and more severe form of the disease which could lead to hospitalization and rapid death. Both diseases are airborne and spread when people cough or sneeze.
Latent TB is present in populations everywhere, including the U.S. While there is a high incidence of active TB in India, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria and South Africa, what is less well-known is that nearly 9,000 TB cases were reported in the U.S in 2019 and up to 13 million people are estimated to have the latent form of the disease in the U.S. alone, per the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
It’s these numbers that worry genomics expert and TB researcher Faramarz Valafar, a professor at San Diego State University’s School of Public Health.
https://redetb.org.br/covid-19-could-activate-latent-tuberculosis/
