Tuberculosis Infection

Abstract

Before the COVID-19 virus spread worldwide and became a pandemic in the spring of 2020, the deadliest disease on planet Earth was Tuberculosis (TB). By the end of 2022, around 10.6 million people worldwide fell ill with TB in the calendar year, and 1.3 million died. Unlike viruses such as COVID-19 and HIV, which are relatively new, the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of the tuberculosis infection, has been on Earth for possibly 3 million years, and is still a massive health crisis to this day. In the present, along with many other bacterial infections, antibiotic resistance has negatively impacted the progression of resolving the TB epidemic, leading to the birth of multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB). This has led to researchers attempting to find new antibiotics to treat certain TB infections, and the United Nations hopes to end the TB epidemic by 2030.