Tuberculosis is Spreading

Being someone who loves science especially biology, what came to my attention was all the articles on Tuberculosis this week in the major newspapers such as the National Post, the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. Most of the articles are very similar but I am responding to the article published by the Toronto Star on February 27th.
The brief summary of the article is the World Health Organization released a report saying that a strain of Tuberculosis aka TB which is an infectious disease has emerged and its rates have hit record highs.
This article interested me for two reasons, the scale of the spread of Tuberculosis (TB) and the idea of transforming nature into culture which I will further explain later in my blog. TB is a disease that has inhabited our world for a long time. It is a disease that is in 81 different countries throughout the world. This new strain which is called XDR-TB for extensively drug resistant tuberculosis is now reported in 45 countries throughout the world. The problem is that XDR-TB is almost untreatable from of respiratory disease. What most people do not realize is that TB is a very infectious disease infecting and killing many people throughout the world over the years and the scale of the amount of people and places it infects will continue to rise including in Canada.
This article also had me thinking of the Wild places lecture that we had on February 28th. Tuberculosis is said to have originated in cattle and jumped scales to inhabit humans. In lecture we spoke of transforming nature into culture. I was thinking that if cattle was not domesticated and left in their place or space would TB had the chance to be spread to humans. This is something that I thought of in all infectious diseases such as HIV and its origin of Chimpanzees. If humans had a relationship with nature and these animals and understood them instead of making them pets and domesticating these animals would there be the infectious diseases that occurred today?
I do not know the answer but it is something I think about when I hear about all these infectious diseases. A lot of them occur in nature first then jump scales to infection of humans.
By Ariana Peters

http://www.thestar.com/News/article/307408