What is Tuberculosis ?

About - Introduction - Causes - Spread - Receiving - Treatment - Better

When you breathe out, yawn, speak, sing, or sneeze, air, containing millions of tiny water droplets comes out of your mouth. These "droplet nuclei", are too small for you to see. After you have breathed out, these droplets remain floating in the air around you. If you stay in the same place, you might breathe some of these in again, putting them back into your system, or someone else might breathe them in.

In people infected with the bacteria that cause TB, these tiny water droplets that are breathed out can contain the TB bacteria. In this way, tuberculosis is easily spread from one person to another. Although you might not be able to see any water droplets at all, there could be as many as 500 bacterial cells in one drop smaller than the head of a pin.

Tuberculosis is most commonly spread from a person with untreated TB disease to other people sharing the same living or confined working space. For example, families or persons sharing an office at work.

Before we had drugs to treat tuberculosis, the only way people could get over TB was to sit outside, where you could breathe out and the wind would blow away any water droplets you breathed out. Then, when you breathed in again, you would be breathing clean air, and your body would have less disease-causing bacteria entering back in (this was the idea that started sanatorium treatment). In the same way, the best way to prevent the spreading of TB to other people is to avoid sneezing or spraying out of your mouth in confined spaces where others are present.