[Laughs_Last]

Today I've been seeing news stories about a nasty drug resistant strain of TB getting spread in airplanes recently. Read about in at CNN, or BBC, or NPR for the illiterate.

This TB is highly contagious, drug resistant, allegedly fatal, and out there. For those of us wanting TB explained, see it on Wikipedia.

Will we soon be seeing TB coming to a theater near you?

[Eli]

The problem is not just with TB it is much bigger than that. Drug resistant staph aureus used to be rare, now they are becoming much more common.

The larger problem is that all the bugs out there are developing drug resistance much faster than new antibiotics can be invented. Most new antibiotics are really not all that new either they are older drugs that are tweaked slightly to give them a better way of attacking bacteria.

It is hard to remember but people used to die from things like toothaches because infections would set in and kill them.

Ask any infectious disease docs are scared to death of what the future holds as far as bacteria go. They are seeing things now that they have never seen before like genetic transfer between completely different bacteria. That was not supposed to be possible.

[NEOPO]

That means that the impossible is possible!

I wonder what AP thinks of this developement

[Laughs_Last]

1.Guinea worm disease?
2.Onchocerciasis?

Hey, this should be a TB thread.

[midnight-gamer]

I just read about this and rushed to post here on peakoil. I know it's somewhat off topic, but i respect the opinons I get here. For people not familar with with TB, read a little about Waverly Hills.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waverly_Hills_Sanatorium
I hope that there is not going to be a return to brutal treatment methods used in the face of hard/ impossible to cure ailments like this.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('midnight-gamer', '
')I hope that there is not going to be a return to brutal treatment methods used in the face of hard/ impossible to cure ailments like this.

[midnight-gamer]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') hope there IS going to be a return to the use of the forcible quarantine on people with contagious and incurable diseases like XDR Tuberculosis who are so irresponsible that they engage in behaviors that infect many other people.

[Plantagenet]

This TB guy is a creepy liar.

First he says no one told him not to fly.

Then later in the same interview he says after he was told
not to fly by the US doctors he decided to get back to the US by flying into Canada.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070530/D8PER3502.html

This kind of person is exactly why we need mandatory quarentines to force these irresponsible people off the street and into medical custody.

[I_Like_Plants]

In cases like this, quarentine is indeed called for. And the guy was told not to fly and flew anyway.

In the various videos of worms etc., the last one is pinworms in the bowel, and it seems like most of us catch a dose of those during childhood, they thrive in those with immature or weakened immune systems. Malnutrition does not help either. Pinworms are pretty well known and not a major health hazard though.

As for the worms in the guy's face, wow. Looks like they were putting some kind of solvent or oil or something on the guy's face to make them come out, at least it's fixable. There are two gals at my local bank whose faces look like that guy's too, I think it's just rosacea (sp?) and I feel sorry for them, they're really nice.

[BigTex]

In Kentucky they used to put the TB patients in caves to quarantine them. They would put them in large underground caverns and build shacks in the caverns for them to live in. They called them "TB huts."

You learn all of this stuff on a tour of the Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky.

Maybe they should find a cave for this guy and keep him in it until he is well.

[I_Like_Plants]

That's odd, dry places are supposed to be best for TB. 100 years ago, places that were dry and high in elevation were considered best, places like Denver.

[strider3700]

ok after seeing those videos I have the urge to pour large amounts of medication down my throat just incase I have them. Are these rare things? If not why don't we hear much about people with worms. Is it something in our diets that deals with them most of the time?

[I_Like_Plants]

Healthy humans don't get worms, as a general rule. Traditional tribal medicine has ways of flushing out worms too - various purges and make-you-shit preparations. So, in general, a healthy human out in the wild is not wormy.

This changes when you get the kind of malnutrition and overcrowding we call Civilization.

[mlit]

Clean water, a great deal of third world water is from sewage filled rivers

[I_Like_Plants]

but a great deal of Mankind's water came from self-cleaning springs and streams, etc., it's only when the monster of Civilization came along that we started drinking each other's piss and shit.

[eastbay]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... 531D25.DTL

And most disturbing of all is the idiots at DHS knew he was a threat, knew he was planning an entry, and allowed him to enter and freely mingle in the general population anyhow. this is another perfect example demonstrating that the US is pretending to guard the borders from real threats such as this and ceaselessly screwing with legitimate travellers.

[mlit]

I'm betting new rules will be put in place because of this. Flying around knowing you are infected with something like this is like knowing you have aids but going around sleeping with as many as you can.

[nella]

I read what lines of drugs this TB strain is resistant to and it's bad. The 1st and 2nd line drugs are not going to work.
It'll be very hard to treat and may require surgical intervention. Cost of treatment may go as high as 500,000 if the surgery is needed.
That's for 1 case.

I'd have to go back and read what I have access to but I thought the CC didn't have all tests back yet when the man fled, they didn't the know the extent of what all he was resistant to.

[cynthia]

This is a prime example what could happen in a pandemic. We are only seeing one person and his poor/selfish judgement here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070531/ap_ ... mGI.us0NUE What if this were hundreds if not thousands of people?
Bird flu comes to mind. If an infected person panics and can bribe someone to let them through an airport or other public terminal (in the TB case the airport screener said the man, while flagged on the computer, appeared fine and let him through anyway. Yes, said screener's ass should be grass for that).
The TB guy, lawyer or not, thought his survival depended upon his return to the US for treatment. Thinking about the highest good for all concerned certainly didn't occur to this man's thinking.
An unfortunate glimpse into our future.
cynthia