Eighteen years of thoracic surgery project. A review in relation to the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis

Abstract

In order to make the most effective use of the only existing government tuberculosis hospital in the country, the Thoracic Surgery Project was started by the Department of Health in 1952 to supplement the ambulatory treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis, which had become possible with the advent of chemotherapy, so that patients who failed to respond to medical treatment could be cured by resectional surgery. 

This paper briefly reviews the work of the Project during its 18 years of operation. In the early period of chemotherapy the operative and post-operative mortalities ranged from 5 to 9% with equally high rates of major complications. With improvement and progress in chemotherapy particularly with more or newer drugs available, the result became better, at present comparable to that in developed countries. However, the frequency of surgical intervention as a whole was beginning to show a trend of decline, being limited to major destructive lesions, while smaller involvements were successfully managed by reserved drug treatment. Although tuberculosis would continue to be the first priority in the hospital's policy, mainly for retreatment, for a long time to come, the Thoracic Surgery Project now also embraces non-tuberculous pulmonary as well as cardiac diseases.