User:WeepingBritney/Tuberculosis prof review

Quality as a teaching aid
This article is appropriate for undergraduates, although not as detailed as I would like for junior-senior level students in a microbiology course. I would not use it for my MMG461 Microbial Pathogenesis course for that level of students. It covers quite a bit of information, but spends too much time talking about the history of the disease (all the many different names it has been given, etc.) and I think does not give enough detail on what we know about how the bacterium causes disease. It is also quite repetitive of some facts - and really likes to repeat that the mortality rate is 50%! Yes, it does mention that the 50% rate is only for active, untreated infections, but that point gets lost occasionally. The authors are trying to be a bit sensational in how they word things. I also think the order is a bit less than logical, with a lot on history at the end. I would use an up to date textbook chapter for undergrads and a recent review article for the published literature for grads if I were teaching this.

Quality as a summary of the topic
Okay, keep in mind that I am a microbiologist who specializes in pathogenesis and infectious diseases. I found that there were a few mistakes or unclear statements in the bacteriology, things such as saying that Mtb has only one outer membrane when it is a gram positive organism with a cytoplasmic or inner membrane and no outer membrane. I would also have wanted more detail on the pathogenesis of disease and the virulence factors of the organism that contribute to the disease, but that may be more than the readers you specify would want. I would have like to see more information on the development of drug resistance and new vaccines, which were treated very briefly. I found that there were places where they used acronyms that were not clear. Overall, the article is up to date. It just gets a bit too sensational with its data and doesn't go into enough bacteriologic depth for me.

Readability
It's readable, but as mentioned before, a bit out of logical order and there are some redundancies. It does not get too technical (actually, not enough for me).

Figures
The figures are basically worthless, except perhaps for the acid-fast stain.