Tuberculosis
Previously, the policy brief focused on social and behavioural factors impacting the spread and contracting of tuberculosis. Environmental factors can also influence the prevalence and spread of the disease. The environmental factors can include water, food insecurity, and lack of sanitation, war/conflict, globalization, and climate change. Besides, access to health care is a significant determinant on the spread and outcome of diseases in most countries. Global and local health organisations and governments in many countries have partnered in running campaigns geared towards providing sustainable and hazardous free environments. The objective is to ensure that the population are living and working in a disease-free environment and overall improve health status. Therefore, it is momentous to explore how the environment and access to health services can affect the prevalence of TB.
Water is an important natural resource, and the lack of it or contamination of the natural resource have been linked to spreading or development of certain diseases. Today, there is not much information relating to the lack or pollution of water on the prevalence or transmission of the TB. The poor sanitation of wastewater from the hospital can increase the spread of the disease. In addition, poor hygiene can include improper ways of dealing with solid waste from hospitals, which may consist of sputum carrying TB bacteria. When the solid is poorly disposed there is a high likelihood that it will get mixed with air particulates, which sequentially transmits the disease to the proximate population. Food insecurity is another major concern when exploring the exposure and prevalence of TB. Food insecurity can lead to poor nutrition or malnutrition that causes the human body to become susceptible to the disease since the immune system is quite weak to fight any pathogens getting into the human body.
War and armed conflicts have been linked to spread and emergence of diseases. Crises such armed conflicts always leads to displacement of populations and such have been said to upsurge the risk of TB by 20-fold. Note wars and conflicts come with destruction of the existing health provision structures, paralyze health agendas, lower the chances of conducting immunization, and even contribute to substantial shortage of health workers. For instance, when the Syrian crisis began in 2011, the bordering countries reported a major increase in TB cases. Globalization has on been put on the map by world health organization (WHO) is a significant contributor to spread to TB. With globalization comes increased international travel, which means that infected persons can spread TB, and it is quite a concern, especially in developing countries where the multidrug-resistant TB is a major problem. Globalization has led to the growth of industries and urban areas, which are sometimes quite overcrowded provided suitable conditions for the spread of TB.
Climate change has also been instrumental in the prevalence of the infectious disease across the globe. Today, climate change causes shifts in humidity, temperature, and precipitation, which affects the development of TB-causing bacteria. The atmospheric pollution causes carbon monoxide particulates, which encourages bacillary reactivation and somehow increase the incidence of TB. Finally, access to health care services is always a significant factor to consider when talking about infectious diseases. Proper health care is instrumental in hampering the spread and incidence of TB. Most developing countries are still struggling in the health sector, whereby the range of health facilities is quite uneven. Also, the high cost of care acts as a hindrance for access health care for many poor patients, risking the infection to other people.