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[Your Tuberculosis Association presents]

[Produced by Leslie Roush Productions, Inc., Supervised by Film Counselors, Inc.]

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[Narrator:] Hello there. 

Do you know what we've just been looking at? 

Well, the thin little red rods you saw were tubercle bacilli, the germs that give people tuberculosis. 

Maybe you didn't get a very clear look at them. 

So come on, better take another look. 

There they are. 

Tiny, but dangerous, murderous little things that can destroy people's lungs. 

These are only a few of the millions of TB germs that live in the lungs of a person 

who has tuberculosis. 

'Course, the germs aren't naturally red. 

These have been stained and magnified about a thousand times so we could see them. 

Incredibly small these tubercle bacilli, these TB germs. 

Why they're so very small that...well, take this common ordinary straight pin. 

If you drew a line across the head of this pin, you could place about four thousand tubercle bacilli on it,

side-by-side, and it would take over one million TB germs to cover the whole head of the pin. 

This is an electron microscope. 

Let's see what one single tubercle bacillus looks like through this. 

Well, there he is, Mr. Tubercle Bacillus himself, magnified to forty eight thousand times

his natural size. 

Not a very happy-looking specimen, is he? 

Powerful kind of enemy, though. 

He and trillions of his fellow parasites have been killing human beings since the beginning of history. 

For centuries tuberculosis was called the white plague. 

It destroyed masses of people, and it was only about seventy years ago that we discovered 

the identity of this germ. 

Since that time we've learned a lot about tuberculosis. 

How to fight it, how to cure it, how to keep TB germs from spreading and infecting all of us. 

But there's still a long way to go. 

To fight anything effectively, you've got to know what it is, how it fights us. 

That's why I'm giving you this inside look at TB. 

Tuberculosis is mostly an airborne infection. You don't inherit it, you're not born with it. 

You breath in the germs, somebody who has tuberculosis passes it onto you. 

Well, something like this. 

Now this is what happens when you sneeze or cough without covering your mouth. 

Now, if the person who sneezes or coughs has tuberculosis, just imagine how many 

of these tiny germs might be clinging to the droplets in the spray. 

Anyone might breathe them into his lungs. 

But some of the droplets fall to the ground, dry up, and mix with the dust, 

and TB germs stay alive a long time. 

Under favorable conditions, the tubercle bacilli can stay alive in dust for months. 

Could be a million TB germs floating around in the dust particles you see there,

just waiting for someone to breathe them in, to draw them down into his lungs. 

Lungs, you know, are the part of the human body where TB germs usually grow. 

Sometimes they attack other internal organs, even our bones,

 but most of the time they get at our lungs. 

You see, the lungs are made up of a network of branching tubes leading into tiny air sacs.

The lungs' air passages are exactly the right size for catching TB germs, 

and each air sac is, well, something like this. 

Of course this isn't the right size. 

If you breathe in TB germs, they're carried through the tube, and they're trapped in the air sac. 

They infect the lung tissues all around the sac, causing an intense inflammation. 

Some of the surrounding cells die. 

If this progresses to any extent, a cavity is formed. 

If left unchecked the disease will spread. 

There will be more and more cavities and the person will eventually die. 

Most of us have TB germs in our bodies at one time or another,

but in most cases active tuberculosis does not develop. 

That's because a healthy body fights back. 

A healthy body surrounds the germs with a wall of white blood cells. 

This is a called a tubercle. 

The germs may stay alive inside this tubercle for years, held in check by strong body defenses. 

But if a healthy body is weakened by illness, overwork, exhausting play, inadequate food, 

any number of things, the wall may break down, allowing the TB germs to escape,

 and start their cycle of infection all over again. 

You know quite often people have TB without even knowing it. 

That's what makes it so difficult to find tuberculosis: to prevent it, to cure it. 

There are a number of ways to find TB. 

You can tell whether infection has taken place by a tuberculin test. 

This is commonly done by a small injection into the skin. 

A tuberculin test can also be applied with a patch of adhesive tape, 

but the tuberculin test alone is not enough. 

One of the best tools we have for finding TB is the chest X-ray. 

Modern X-ray equipment can take a clear picture of your lungs. 

It can show doctors where the TB germs have damaged your lungs,

long before you would feel sick or show any apparent symptoms. 

This is a simple, easy, quick way to find TB. 

A chest x-ray can disclose tuberculosis just when the damage has been started. 

This is when the disease is easiest to cure. 

The person with active TB is a danger to the people he lives and works with. 

He should be kept apart from them. 

This is one of the important reasons for a tuberculosis hospital. 

A TB hospital is a cure and preventive all at once. 

Slowly, through proper care, proper facilities, trained personnel, the TB germs are overcome. 

The patient heals, and by being isolated, the sick person doesn't spread his germs

to his family and friends. 

By wearing protective clothing and by special handling of garments, bedclothing, 

food and other articles, the doctors and nurses prevent the germs from spreading. 

Only in a hospital can a TB patient get the best medical, nursing, and surgical care, 

and only in a hospital can a person sick with TB get the kind of rest he needs. 

And rest is still the basic cure for TB. 

Let's look at an X-ray motion picture of the human chest in action and you'll see why. 

Notice how the heart beats, how the lungs move rhythmically as the person breathes. 

This person is at rest in a hospital. 

The lung is quiet and has a chance to heal, to fight off the germs. 

Here are the lungs of a person who has been exercising or running. 

This kind of breathing expands the lungs, stretches the lung tissues, makes the cavities 

caused by TB germs much harder to heal. 

That's why the right kind of rest, the hospital kind of rest, is necessary to cure tuberculosis. 

You know, once in a while it's advisable to make a lung almost or entirely still until it heals. 

One way to do this is pneumothorax. 

Air is introduced into the chest through a needle. 

The air moves around the lung, the lung moves back from the chest wall, has very little work to do, 

and has a chance to heal much faster. 

Another way of putting the lung at rest is called pneumoperitoneum. 

In this method air is forced up under the diaphragm and partially collapses both lungs, 

allowing them to rest until they're healed. 

If part of the lung is badly diseased, it's no use to you. 

This is where the surgeon enters the tuberculosis picture. 

By an operation called thoracoplasty, he can collapse the lung permanently. 

That is, he removes sections of rib over the diseased area. 

The chest wall moves in to immobilize the damaged lung. 

Under certain conditions, the surgeon will remove the diseased part

and let the healthy part of the lung take over. 

This is called resection. 

In many cases, a larger area, or even an entire lung is taken out. 

Now, there's something else I want to talk about. 

The wonderful exciting new drugs that are being discovered and developed all of the time. 

Drugs that prevent TB germs from multiplying, drugs that have made possible great advances in 

all phases of tuberculosis treatment. 

Both of these test tubes were inoculated with the same number of TB germs at the same time. 

One tube contained a small amount of a new drug. 

Since that time, in this tube, the TB germs have multiplied by the billions, 

but in this one containing the drug no growth has taken place. 

But even the best of drugs cannot heal a lung already partly destroyed by TB germs. 

Surgery with rest and other treatment has a big part to play in curing TB. 

So science has discovered many ways to find TB to cure it. 

But remember, tuberculosis doesn't always develop when TB germs get into the lungs. 

Many people can resist the germs. 

How people live, what they eat, how they work, play, the kinds of houses they live in,

what they know about good health practices. 

These are also important in the prevention of tuberculosis. 

In fact, it's just as important to improve human living conditions as it is to fight TB germs directly. 

You know in the United States, we have high standards of living, excellent TB hospitals. 

Many, many x-rays are taken. 

But still, even so, TB kills more people between the ages of 15 and 35 than any other disease. 

Right now in this country there are about 400,000 people with active tuberculosis, 

and the frightening thing is, three out of four of these people are not in hospitals. 

So there's still a tremendous job to do throughout the world. 

Among millions of people TB control has hardly been started. 

In many countries TB still kills more people than any other disease. 

Now we, we started with a germ so tiny that only a powerful microscope could reveal it, 

and now this little germ has led us into a battle so big that it involves the whole world.

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A battle we have to fight with all the technical tools at our command, a battle we must win:

the battle against tuberculosis.

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[Through your purchases of Christmas Seals your tuberculosis association fights TB]

[The End, National Tuberculosis Association, Copyright 1953]