In modern times TB kills a million and a half people a year. That is 15 percent of the people that catch the active form of it. So progress in fighting it deserves to be honored, even a 100 years later in the form of German physician Robert Koch. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
There is a lot going on on this stamp with a portrait of Dr. Koch, lab equipment. and even a rendering of the TB bacteria growing on a lad culture. Not sure the rendering in black and white was the best choice. It resembles a pre painting artist sketch rather than a finished work.
Todays stamp is issue A948, 2.60 Franc stamp issued by France on November 13, 1982, the 100th anniversary of Dr. Koch isolating the bacteria that causes tuberculosis. It was a single stamp issue. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 40 cents used.
Tuberculosis seems to have originated near the Horn of Africa around the time the first man also originated in Africa. Africa is still the most likely place to find an outbreak. Luckily 90 % of the people that catch it get the latent variety that can’t be passed and has no symptoms. The bacteria attacks the lungs and causes shortness of breath, bloody flem, night sweats, and weight loss. The weight loss is why the disease was traditionally called consumption.
Building on the earlier work of Bengamin Marten who postulated that consumption was caused by a micro organism that is itself alive in consumption sufferers, German Robert Koch tried to isolate the tiny organism. The goal was then to grow the bacteria in a lab from which a vaccination could be developed. Working with Koch was Mr. Petrie of Petrie dish fame, so one can see how new this stuff all was. Koch announced that he had succeeded in 1882 and soon he won a Nobel Prize for his work.
It was not without controversy. French rival Louis Pasteur claimed that the fact that the bacteria was present did not prove causation. The rivalry got quite nasty. The real beef was that the two men had rival TB treatments in testing and the one that was accepted would get rich. Unfortunately neither solution worked as hoped.
In fact, Koch’s Tubercullan treatment actually made the disease worse. You are after all injecting someone with more of the bacteria from which he was already sick. Koch tried to keep secret the negative results and when he was found out, he was fired from his German government supported lab in Berlin.
There is now a vaccination for TB, but it is considered too dangerous to give unless one is already exposed to an outbreak. The treatment today is to administer antibiotics. As with many other bacteria caused diseases, over time the bacteria becomes itself more resistant to antibiotics that don’t change over time.
Well my drink is empty. I wonder if I have been a little hard on Robert Koch. His discovery was important and being human, can he really be blamed for trying to cash in on the discovery? Come again next Monday for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.