How contagious is tuberculosis? How should a person with tuberculosis be treated?

When you have tuberculosis, the first thing you need to do is to look at what type of tuberculosis you have, as follows: First, like tuberculous pleurisy, because patients with tuberculous pleurisy mainly have lesions in the chest cavity, no lesions in the lungs, so sputum doesn't contain tuberculosis bacilli, and it's practically not contagious. Second, if a patient with tuberculosis can be seen in the sputum smear tuberculosis bacilli, then it will be contagious, can be transmitted through the sputum droplets, aerosol transmission, infected to others.

Three, for tuberculosis, because our population basically will be injected BCG vaccine, so that is, the tuberculosis itself has a certain resistance. Being infected also depends on the patient's own state,whether the immune system is low, whether there are some comorbidities such as diabetes or other diseases, autoimmune diseases, etc., the immune system is prone to be infected.

The treatment of tuberculosis is mainly two aspects, on the one hand is the drug treatment, and on the other hand is the surgical treatment, but now in the clinic has been rarely used in the surgical treatment, because clinically there are a lot of effective anti-tuberculosis medicines, so in the treatment of tuberculosis, still the The use of medication is routine.

The treatment of tuberculosis focuses on anti-tuberculosis treatment, and usually patients should follow the principles of tuberculosis treatment with early, combined, regular, and whole course of anti-tuberculosis drug therapy. For the first treatment of non-drug-resistant tuberculosis patients, usually oral rifampicin, isoniazid, ethambutol, pyrazinamide, in accordance with the principle of intensive consolidation of the treatment period, usually need more than 9 months of treatment course for treatment. At the same time, patients should strengthen the support of symptomatic treatment, for example, patients with hemoptysis, to be stopped, cough patients also need to perform cough treatment.

For tuberculosis combined with tuberculous pleural effusion, thoracentesis is also needed to drain the pleural fluid. Additionally, for retreatment of tuberculosis and the existence of drug-resistant tuberculosis, it is necessary to choose sensitive anti-tuberculosis drugs according to the results of sputum culture, and the course of anti-tuberculosis drugs needs to be significantly prolonged.