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Tuberculosis May Become A Global Threat Again
Iphtashu Fitz writes "The journal Nature Medicine is due to release a report today on how highly drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis are on the verge of becoming a global epidimic. Strains of TB that are highly resistant to antibiotics are becoming increasingly prevalent in places like Russia, eastern Europe, and China, and only small changes are required to make these strains start spreading quickly. Treatment for multiple-drug-resistant strains of TB requires a carefully monitored cocktail of drugs taken for months on end, a regimin that many, especially in poorer countries are unlikely to follow to completion. The strategy used by the World Health Organization to combat TB, the "directly observed treatment, short course" or DOTS, involves using trained health workers to watch patients take their long courses of drugs, since even a little carelessness could result in TB mutating into a more drug resistant form within the patient." Oh, Alexander Fleming ? where art thou now?
So someone probably coughed in an elevator, in a kitchen or whatever and myself and anyone else in the vicinity were exposed.
I was put on Isoniazid with vitamin B6 (because Isoniazid knocks the sh!t out of your liver) for 9 grueling months. The first month I felt like I was dying. It really played havoc with mountain biking and meant no beer for 9 months, it was glorius to be off it.
Even two years ago it was recognized that there was an epidemic of TB in the asian sub continent and many of the H1B workers to came in may not have had it full blown, but had it and were bringing it into the USA. Could very well have been one of the fine people I worked with shortly after moving to California, but by no means would the state be unique. On weekends and holidays I'm a cyclist and put in long miles with considerable effort, which means I'm pretty well in tune with how my lungs are doing. Any little change, a day more phlegmy the others makes me take notice and track whatever seems be be going on. For that I thank all the brilliant people and lobbyists who made it so much easier during the tech boom to let people into the country on a rush to fill positions in businesses (which lobbied like hell for increases in H1B and more lax health screening.)
A little background on TB, the bug is not killed by the immune system, but isolated. If it's under control that means a little cyst-like structure is built around it which hopefully contains it the rest of the hosts life. A severe respiratory infection can weakend the immune system to the point that the bug gets out and wreaks havoc, more likely at advanced age.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Dead.
Oh, Alexander Fleming? where art thou now?
He's right here, silly.
Trolling is a art,
America has the lowest rate of TB infection because we manage the disease differently than the rest of the world.
The rest of the world gives the ineffective TB vaccine, while the US doesn't. The TB vaccine is known not to work, and it ruins the best test we have to screen for infection - the ppd (TB skin test).
In America, we treat everyone that converts their skin test and we don't administer the TB vaccine. Our public health officials deserve a big pat on the back for this decision.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
MDR TB has been on the rise for years, as have worries about its transmissibility. Read "And the Band Played On" (mostly about AIDS in the 80's) or "The Coming Plague" (about emergent diseases) for good overviews.
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First it was going to be AIDS, then it was SARS, cancer is slowly being beaten...
Maybe a nice new healthy TB strain will be the new plague to rid ourselves of some of the population.
How long has it been, at least 400-600 years since a nice big population dwindling event has occurred...
My daily commute isn't getting any shorter, oil seems to be running out... air is getting more and more polluted... time for the G-O-D to clean the house out a little...
(and if it's my time to go, I'm fine with that)
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
You only use 2% of your DNA
when we let big pharmaceutical companies take control of R&D.
Most antibiotics today are BASED on peniciline. Truth is, these resistant TB strains are resistant against PENICILINE-based antibiotics.
As I saw on Discovery once... There are thousands of natural antibiotics which are extremely complex. Some can be taken from cactae in South America, some can be taken from certain species of ants.
But natural antibiotics just can't be patented (think of it as the OSS medicine), and companies don't give a sh*t about them.
Hmph.
Bacteria (not computer, although I suppose it could apply too) evolve regularly. Some strains of staph are now resistant to most antibiotics. I had a case of MRSA (Mesocillin Resistant Staph Aureus) two summers ago after having surgery. It was most unpleasant and only an IV-induced superdrug called Vancomycin could destroy it. So, to me it's not all that surprising that TB is making a comeback. It finally figured out how to immunize itself.
This is why:
(1) If you're proscribed antibiotics, you should take them exactly as instructed; take them for the whole course, do not stop in the last couple days or when the symptoms go away;
(2) Do not attempt to "chase off" what you think might be an oncoming infection by taking a "leftover" pill or two from a previous subscription
(3) Realize that many infections are viral; do not expect or demand to be proscribed antibiotics contrary to your doctor's wishes
Doctors are now becoming very aware of bad behaviors which cause bacteria to become antibiotic-resistant, but convincing people to follow good practice is apparently harder.
I don't know much about TB but I was having a discussion with a doctor the other day and he passed along this tidbit: Humans have never devised a way to kill viruses once inside the body. The common cold? Virus. What can you do? Wait it out. Sure we can treat symptoms and, in some cases, endrun the virus to head off some of its bad affects but meet it head to head and win? Hasn't happened yet. This discussion was in the context of the "every patient who has a cold wants an antibiotic" discussion. He has a tough time explaining to people that anitbiotics don't treat colds. Sure, they can contain a secondary infection but it won't help the cold at all...I don't know how much he was talking out of his ass but it was interesting.
My kids are gonna never believe that "when I was your age, my parents could take me to the doctor and get me a jab with a needle and it would cure any bacterial infection you got."
And when they ask what went wrong do I get to tell them about free clinics giving unsupervised drugs to junkies in the US and Europe, and charity doctors giving unsupervised drugs to people in Africa and Asia who believe more in witch doctors and temple sacrifices than the germ theory of disease?
Is it wrong to think we shoulda withheld medical technology from people incapable of using it properly so it would still work for us?
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
My father lost his father when he was a mere 9
years old to TB. I don't understand why people
treat this as "someone elses problem" - it isn't a
SEP. It *will* bite you. You'll never have to worry about new diseases because the old ones are doing nicely...
The irony with TB is that
people think they are getting well, and stop taking
the drugs (which are making them feel ill). End result: great selection pressure to make resistant bugs).
I for one pray that we can stamp out that big disease called ignorance (hey, look at what happened in Nigeria with that dumb fuck (who cares
what religion?) and Polio). Damn. I had a friend
with scars from hell and calipers when I was a kid
and I'm a mere 45 year old. I never want to see
such things, not even in my nightmares...
To anyone who's interested in the subject, I'd reccomend them to read Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, a halfway decent book on the very interesting subject of Dr Paul Farmer, who's been desling with TB epidemics in Haiti / Siberia / Etc for quite a while now. Very informative.
Not sarcastic at all - The Gates Foundation is one of the major forces fighting TB today.
History will show that the baby boom and X generations, who worry and fret about every little imagined risk, actually will have lived in the golden age of human health. This will be the period when antibiotics were effective and vaccines developed in the mid 20th century kept them safe from the viral diseases. Evolution will overcome all those safeguards.
People under 30 have a bleak future.
.. suddenly, those 'oceanic arkologies' seem an even better idea ..
.. by the time viruses can transmute the ocean/atmosphere barrier, its time to be deep, deep in space.
of, but of course
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Even things as simple as the commom cold are highly mobile conpared to a "few" years ago. Given air travel what it is today; a small outbreak of anything highly contagious can spell absolute disaster on a global scale. It's easy to forget people have only recently become the global travelers we now are. TB and all the others are no longer isolated to the point of initial/original concentration. Adds new meaning to "just off the jet".
It's good to see an everything2 link on the front page; I thought the editors stopped doing that
I live in London and I have noticed over the years an increase in people spitting in the streets. Now dispite being fucking disgusting I believe this has contributed to the increase in the number of TB cases seen in the UK.
I wish these people could get a bit of class and just stop spitting.
----
Antibiotic resistance was noted in hospitals in the 50's and 60's, spurring the few physicians who observed it to advise restrictions on antibiotic prescriptions. Few, however, heeded this advice and decades later, antibiotics are still prescribed readily throughout the world -- even without a doctor's prescription or supervision in a number of countries. Of course there is significant noise now about the continued development of resistant bacteria, but it still has little effect in places where such drugs are easy to come by and cheap.
As an interesting aside, bacteria aren't the only pathogens that can develop resistance to devices we use to kill them. Early protease inhibitor use in AIDS patients resulted in strains of AIDS that were resistant to that treatment.
In China, where big pharm isn't in control (remember, this is the land of the bear gall bladder as medicine guys) today's news is reporting that over half urban dwellers are sick ! And that the hardest hit there are middle managers, whose life expectancy is down to 58 years old for well below the national average of 72. Yet the article's stll defending "traditional chinese medicine". Bears of the world, watch out!
this is a direct result of Illigal Imigration and not health screening people wanting to enter the US. y.
RFID tag + auto dosage (below skin) of anti-biotic. You get sick, you get tagged and you are forced to take your meds. With something like TB you should not get to screw around with other people's health.
I thought that was a movie about finding a cure for cancer...
As I understand Tuberculosis has never been treatable by penicilin or variants, only the other infections that happen as the result of a weakened body and immune system.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Personally, I hold doctors highly liable for the abuse, misuse and general over-use of antibiotics. Of course the patients are pretty damned stupid too, but I have seen cases where the doctor didn't see anything but a blood test before prescribing the antibiotics.
There are so many natural ways to inspire your own immune system to build and strengthen itself and it seems to me that for capitalistic reasons alone medical professionals do not prescribe them.
I'm not a doctor or medical expert either. But I'll say this much -- from the time I decided I was done taking pills and crap for every minor problem out there and let my body do its own healing, I have been a healthier, stronger person and I can't remember the last time I was sick... I remember what it was -- the flu -- but it was great than 5 years ago and basically, I just waited it out -- fever and headaches and agony and all. I recognize the fact that extreme situations call for the use of medicines and other modern medical techniques. But I think they are way over-used and in my opinion (guess) it's so they can way over-charge people.
If it's "worldwide" it should be called a pandemic threat, not simply an epidemic threat.
or however you spell it, tries to get rid of the symptons.. have fever reduce it, have cold vanish it but does it look at fighting the root cause of the ailment??
alternate medications like homeopathy, ayurveda etc. should be explored as well..
btw quite obviously IANAD
Tubercolosis? LOL! This is not a problem! We live in a perfectly disinfected world... COUGH!! ... no bacteria can survive COUGHHH COUGH! we have the most advanced antibiotics and medicines... COoOoooOUGH! COUuUuuuGH!!
COUGH... WTF!?... COUGH! COUGGGHHH! SCOUGHGCH... BLEURG...
*STUNF*
Actually, it's only been about 60 years since the last population decrease.
Of course that population dwindling took out lots of the genetically strong specimens and left a pile of weak ones in its place.
So I guess it goes both ways...
Live forever, or die trying.
Just a little background info, blatantly ripped off of this website: http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/mycobact erium
Sorry for the crappy formatting.
Mycobacterium is the only genus in the family Mycobacteriaceae of bacteria. This genus includes many pathogens known to cause serious diseases in mammals, including tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, also called TB, phthisis, consumption, and nicknamed the white plague, is the most common infectious disease in the world today. It is caused by a bacterium, usually the Mycobacterium tuberculosis but any member of the so called Tuberculosis complex will do. If left untreated, more than 50% will die in a few years time. It causes about 2-3 million deaths per year out of 9-10 million cases and is especially prevalent in undeveloped, tropical countries.
and leprosy
Hansen's disease, also known as leprosy, is an infectious disease caused by infection by Mycobacterium leprae. The modern name of the disease comes from the discoverer of Mycobacterium leprae, G. A. Hansen. Sufferers from Hansen's disease have generally been called lepers, although this term is falling into disuse both from the diminishing number of leprosy patients and from pressure to avoid the demeaning connotations of the term.
Most mycobacteria are classified into two categories, the fast-growing kind and the slow-growing kind, and most mycobacteria share some common characteristics:
* They are widespread organisms, typically living in water (including tap water treated with chlorine) and food sources.
* They can colonize their hosts without the hosts showing any adverse signs. For example, millions of people around the world are infected with M. tuberculosis
Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the bacteria that causes most cases of tuberculosis. Its genome has been sequenced.
It is a Gram-positive aerobic mycobacterium that divides every 16-20 hours. This is extremely slow compared to other bacteria which tend to have division times measured in minutes (for example, E. coli can divide roughly every 20 minutes). It is a small rod-like bacillus which can withstand weak disinfectants and can survive in a dry state for weeks but can only grow within a host organism.
but will never know it because they will not develop symptoms.
* Mycobacterial infections are notoriously difficult to treat. The organisms are hardy and can survive long exposure to antibiotics, which naturally leads to antibiotic resistance Antibiotic resistance is the ability of a microorganism to withstand the effects of an antibiotic. Antibiotic resistance develops through mutation or plasmid exchange between bacteria of the same species. If a bacterium carries several resistance genes, it is called multiresistant or, informally, a superbug.
Most mycobacteria are susceptible to the antibiotics clarithromycin and rifamycin, but antibiotic-resistant strains are known to exist.
* Mycobacteria tend to be fastidious (difficult to culture), sometimes taking over two years to develop in culture.
Species * M. tuberculosis, which causes tuberculosis Tuberculosis, also called TB, phthisis, consumption, and nicknamed the white plague, is the most common infectious disease in the world today. It is caused by a bacterium, usually the Mycobacterium tuberculosis but any member of the so called Tuberculosis complex will do. If left untreated, more than 50% will die in a few years time. It causes about 2-3 million deaths per year out of 9-10 million cases and is especially prevalent in undeveloped, tropical countries.
* M. leprae
Mycobacterium leprae, also known as Hansen's bacillus, is the bacterium that causes leprosy (now called Hansen's disease). It is an intracellular, pleomorphic, but usually rod shaped, acid fast, gram positive, aerobic only remotel
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Yeah, I'm a Gen-X'er, and I know how glad I was to have an effective AIDS vaccine when I was growing up.
If the doctors are at fault, it is for bowing to the demands of ignorant, demanding patients who want antibiotics for every sniffle that little Tyffany or Brett get. I have had several co-workers who just wouldn't give up the belief that they could blast the common cold by having their pediatrician shoot up Junior with penicillin.
The Mexican practice of selling antibiotics over the counter doesn't help either. They're treated as a cure-all down there, and immigrants continue the practice.
Like the poster said, you're better off living a clean and healthy lifestyle, putting up with minor ailments, and saving antibiotics for actual bacterial infections.
Stefan
The story about the nicaraguan deaf children, and this tuberculosis story were both covered thouroughly in the PBS documentary series Evolution. Portions of the relevant segments are available online on the PBS website:
Deaf Children Video
Tuberculosis Video
We've got artificial hearts, artificial limbs and we're working on artificial eyes. What's it going to take to make artificial lungs? I'm talking from a technical standpoint here, not socially or legislatively.
I find it disturbing that you know the URL for something like this - what, looking for lunch?
www.eFax.com are spammers
. . . but please do these explorations in some isolated area, because while you're waiting for the herbs and massages and enemas to work the patients will still be infectious.
Um, no, allopathy doesn't simply try to "get rid of the symptoms." Antibiotics kill the bacteria that cause tuberculosis. You can't get much more direct than that.
You could argue that people who take wholistic practices to heart and live a healthy lifestyle might be less prone to infection, but that's another story.
Stefan
Not to contradict, however my bro. in law was just diagnosed with TB. He's forty three, a manager of a large trucking company and is in fairly continuous contact with native Canadian employees - whom his physician suspects of having been the "donor".
He is starting his drug cocktail within the next week and his doctor is hopefull that he'll be off it in six-nine months as his general health is good.
Although TB may be well controlled now in the US (and by logical extension Canada), it does appear to be a little more active than we are giving it credit for. I would consider this a timely article.
Was just going to take the transhumanistic angle when I saw this. Leave the politics to the lower beings--this is /. . Heart-lung machines are already available. Lungs shouldn't be important to a transhuman--only the brain is.
-I am an elective eunuch.
"Alright, I'm a practicing lung doctor so I've got to say a little bit."
[...]
"Using INH for a long enough duration will not cause resistence. Dead bugs can't develop resistence."
[...]
"In the grand scheme of things, TB may be getting worse worldwide, but here in the states it seems well controlled. We have a huge immigrant population, and I have seen on a couple cases of active TB over the last 5 years."
The article we're all discussing in this thread reports the incipient global TB epidemic caused by carpetbombing TB exposees with bacteriocides, which leaves the few mutants resistant to the drug to inherit their food supply: us. The principle of using a drug like INH "long enough" to kill all of the bacteria, even the more resistant mutants, depends on "long enough" being both less than the human lifetime, and humans nearly always following the long program. The biology of TB, or any other very large population fought with merely systematic techniques, allows at least a small population to survive, which can then reproduce. If large enough, that population can overcome the human immune response that resists the original infection (if the immune system hasn't been damaged too much, along with the liver damage, from the medication). Unless each bacterium is destroyed individually, systematic is all we've got, and we're dealing with statistics. The same reality applies to human behavior - highly variable across populations of millions, inevitably slopping across any thresholds. This attitude is solid biochemistry, but bad medicine. And it's the unchanging environmental factor within which TB has adapted. Without an alternative, the MDR epidemic seems inevitable, making inroads in the US more slowly, but just as inexorably as abroad.
--
make install -not war
A condition of employment was to not have TB. HIV/AIDS, pregnancy or a broken limb do not spread by a cough, to my knowledge. Maybe I'd be entitled to some form of workman's comp, but I couldn't perform my job at my location. (Which really was pretty silly when you come down to it, because 100 infected people could pass through the door every day, coughing their heads off, but an employee, nooooo...)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What you're calling antibiotics, most people call poisins. Organisms evolved these poisons in order to achieve an ecological advantage, but the problem is that they almost always come with side effects. Extermely rare indeed are the toxins that kill off only bacteria without killing you.
The reason most pharmacutical companies concentrate on derivatives is because with relatively little effort they create modified versions of an effective antibiotic work with little side effects.
So, you've found a toxic molecule. Now figure out how it works & what possible use it can be. Remember that no drug comes on the market without mass testing. Hope you've got enough money to finance all that.
Searching through all the different poisins to find molecules is not only a massive undertaking, it also omits the production side of the equation. What good is it to find that miracle molecule if you cannot produce enough to help more than a few people because its source is some rare mushroom that cannot be cultivated. Look into Taxol for an example. It is touted as a miracle drug for cancer, but initially it could only be extacted (in very small quantities) from the bark of the english yew. Yew is not an extremely rare tree bur harvesting enough taxol to treat everyone in the USA for a year would have meant killing every tree on earth. Things have gotten better now that it is possible to create taxol from precursor molecules in the needles, but it is still a very rare and expensive drug. See here for more info.
I'm no doctor but I'm violently allergic to penecillin & most of it's derivatives, so I've looked into why most antibiotic drugs make me sick. I wish there were more choices for me incase of a serious infection, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to go off half cocked on the basis of what a program on Discovery said...
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
As an FYI, we're currently seeing a trend of the older population spending their kids inheritance.
Traditionally, parents bequeath their homes, money, etc.. to their children, and this was a big part of the economy.
Now, with people living longer, the parents are far more likely to spend the money on travel, dining out, etc. (assuming they are in good health) Couple this with the fact that the ones in poor health have their money given to Nursing homes / Prescriptions / etc.
I don't know how, but this definately changes the economy.. So, I don't see the "leaving behind more money" argument.
Rest sound ok, though.
Get real. Homeopathy can't cure anything. It's just a placebo effect.
The dose that you use is so dillute (more than a part in a trillon) that you merly got more chance to win at the loto than taking a molecule of the supposed active ingredient (like snake venom, common poison, etc).
And if you do beleive that water got memory, then with all the polution and bacterias and viruses that came in contact with the water you drink, I don't think that someone in the world would be alive to read this.
Apparently this is highly unusual.
Lucky I'm not a potato.
#19845
Please do a quick Google for antibiotic families and modes of action. You will find pages like this and this.
Penicillin and derivitaves are still prescribed, but virtually every bug in the world (+ dog) is resistent to them.
One evening of watching the Discovery channel does not a B.S. in Microbiology confer.
The "natural" antibiotics to which you refer are still being found by the dozens. The problems are not (primarily) with patents. You have to:
You have to find an organism that has some antibiotic activity. Not as easy as you might thing. Searches go on CONSTANTLY, and the major drug companies grab soil samples from everywhere they can to test for organisms in the soil that exhibit unknown antibiotic properties.
You've spent several years and have found a likely candidate. Now you have to test the snot out of it. How does it do what it does? Is it a cell wall synthesis inhibitor? Does it go after 23S ribosomes? How about side effects? After all, bleach is one of the best antibiotics in the world. It's used for disinfection in BSL3 and BSL 4 microbiology labs. However, it wouldn't do you much good if you were to drink it, either. Drug interactions? If it kills someone that is taking a common drug (or worse, an uncommon drug), you're still in trouble.
Now, you have to start the FDA certification process. Do you think the FDA reimburses you for the millions you've spent to this point if things go bad? Nope. Do you think they're even going to reimburse you for the millions you're going to spend in clinical trials? Not likely. Remember Martha Stewart and IMClone? The bottom fell out of ImClone because they'd sunk a good chunk of their cash into a drug that was not going to be approved (granted, IIRC it was a cancer drug and not an antibiotic, but the principle applies).
Yes, pharmaceutical companies are businesses. They are for-profit. But it is not so much corporate greed that causes some of the outrageous drug prices as it is them having to pay for the research costs involved with the 99 drugs that didn't make it to market with the money made from the one drug that did.
Please do some research before making statements like the ones you've made.
Karma: Chameleon - mostly influenced by bad '80s New Wave music
The chronically homeless are also susceptible to TB from basically nonexistent health care and occasionally living in close quarters in shelters. Add to that their bodies are frequently weakened by alcohol abuse, poor shelter and poor hygiene and you have a vector for TB frequenting public transportation, emergency rooms, shelters, police, etc.
Requiring them to take medicine isn't even a viable option since many suffer from mental illness and they also tend to move around a lot with no way to contact them.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
That's a great post, except...
The solution is to not be a idiot.
Lots of people still think pro wrestling is real, and asking them to try to self-diagnose and self-prescribe antibiotics is insane. If you're intelligent, you are probably aware of all of this already.
I highly recomend reading Mountains Beyound Mountains: Health the World: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer
He essentailly discovered that DOTS doesn't work
In this excellent work, Pulitzer Prize-winner Kidder (The Soul of a New Machine) immerses himself in and beautifully explores the rich drama that exists in the life of Dr. Paul Farmer. A Massachusetts native who has been working in Haiti since 1982, Farmer founded Zanmi Lasante (Creole for Partners in Health), a nongovernmental organization that is the only health-care provider for hundreds of thousands of peasant farmers in the Plateau Central. He did this while juggling work in Haiti and study at the Harvard Medical School. (Farmer received his M.D. and a Ph.D. in anthropology simultaneously in 1990.) During his work in Haiti, Farmer pioneered a community-based treatment method for patients with tuberculosis that, Kidder explains, has had better clinical outcomes than those in U.S. inner cities. For this work, Farmer was recognized in 1993 with a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," all of which he donated to Zanmi Lasante. Using interviews with family members and various friends and associates, Kidder provides a sympathetic account of Farmer's early life, from his idiosyncratic family to his early days in Haiti. Kidder also recounts his time with Farmer as he travels to Moscow; Lima, Peru; Boston; and other cities where Farmer relentlessly seeks funding and educates people about the hard conditions in Haiti. Throughout, Kidder captures the almost saintly effect Farmer has on those whom he treats. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
But of course there is a 10% chance of infection... Death to another versus Lawsuit? Hard pick for the drug manufacturers....
Most all pre-democratic born Eastern Europeans have all been vacinated "thanks" to the "state"...
China and North Korea will vacinate, everyone else won't...
"Upcomming in the next quarter century is the death of the Baby Boomers. When they start to pass on, they will leave behind more money and jobs than you can possibly imagine. "
So can we just get rid of them now and skip straight to that Golden Age?
I am a student from Eastern Europe, and when I came here I had to do a TB test. Well since I remember I always test positive. I never had it, but I was either exposed to TB in the city transportation, or the BCG vacccine we all get in Eastern Europe cause the skin tests to show positive. So they sent me to get a TB xray test. They didn't have the machine on the University campus, I had to ask someone to me to this place in the slums and it cost me lots of money. I thought I would keep the slide and whenever they need to do the skin test again, I'll just tell them the story and show the slide that I am fine. Oh, no I went home for one month and when I came back they told me I had take the test again. Then I asked them, how would they know if I went home or not? The nurse stopped, thought about and then said, they wouldn't know unless I told them. So I said, ok, I'll go and take the test tomorrow. And they never saw me comming back. Did I do the wrong thing? Probably. Why? Because they refused to fully pay for it with the student insurance (a bill I pay which kicks my butt financialy every semester) and there is evidence I've read that blasting the chest with XRays over and over to test for TB can actually increase the chance of getting a full blown TB.
Over the last 30 years (and a few odd days) of my life I have been extrordinarily healthy, I do occasionally get sick, but that should be expected, I smoke, I live in a part of the continental United States that is pretty colse to the tundra, nad I really (until recently) didn't eat well, on top of that I drink a lot, and spend time in large groups of people. The secret to my incredible disease resistance seems to have been not taking antibiotics, and just fighting the damn thing off by sitting at home eating chicken (or fake chicken) soup! If you use antibiotics for every cut every time you will end up with an immune system that no longer has the ability to fight off any infection! Despite what the pharmacutical companies tell us those old family recipies that worked for our great grandparents may be best, so find out what they were, or if thier dead now try google.
Like arts? Like cheesy little Indie mags? Check out www.artwerkmag.com, and don't laugh at the bad coding please.
is to hit it with a long term regimen of antibiotics
which people abandon
the way to create resistant microbes is to use antibiotics haphazardly and indiscriminantly
whick every overprotective parent demands for their child whenever they get the sniffles
so rather than berate and chastise people in to good beahvior, which will never work, why couldn't doctors hand out a patch the kid sticks on his arm that lasts for a week? the tech is already there for smokers trying to quit and women on birth control
and for the tb victim, couldn't you implant something under the skin that gave off low doses for months?
some problems can't be solved technologically
it seems to me that the abandoned regimen and indiscriminate use problems however ARE inclined to be solved with technological means, no?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://www.utopiasprings.com/vcantb.htm Legalize!!!!
One of the very best things I've read on the topic of antibiotic-resistant bacteria:
Bruce Sterling: Bitter Resistance
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Bacteriophage appears to be an alternative to antibiotics for fighting bacteria. An article (you have to pay to access it) in Discover Magazine by Peter Radetsky about bacteriophage was published in November, 1996. It was mentioned by a man named Caisey Harlingten in a Horizon documentary on the BBC, and seems to have been an important publication that set things into motion. What isn't mentioned in the transcript is that right at the end of the documentary, text appears that says the deal between the American company called Georgia Research, Inc. set up by Harlingten and the Eliava Institute fell apart.
Wired wrote a follow up article on the story. One of the disputes involved another man, Alexander Sulakvelidze, opposing the seemingly pointless aim to genetically engineering phages, which Harlingten wanted to do. This possibly has something to do with the fact that genetically engineered products are protected by patents and can be regulated by intellectual property laws, whereas natural phages are not. This is what Harlingten is up to now. He is trying to apply phage therapy to multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis . And this is what Sulakvelidze is up to now, applying phage therapy to livestock.
Evergreen State College and the Rowland Institute at Harvard have pages about bacteriophage. Phage therapy may have some side effects, however. Some types of phage carry genes that can actually make bacteria pathogenic (briefly mentioned at end of page). This has been observed in E. Coli as a response to antibiotics.
This "mix" is (or should be!) mandatory for any form of TBC, not only multi-resistive.
These antibiotics are extremely hard on your liver and also damage your eyesight. One of them colors your urine in pink/red. One additional drawback is that, at the end of the 6-month regimen, your system defenses will be at an all-time low, and it will take several years before you can be back to what you were before the therapy.
IF you default on this therapy, however (if you stop the start taking the medicine again, or you don't take all the pills in the mix etc.) you are going to develop a resistive or multi-resistive strain of TBC. If you develop the multi-resistive strain, you're in GREAT trouble, and are a huge hazard for the people you spend time with (which is, presumibly, the ones that are most dear to you). There are very few antibiotics which are effective with such strains, and are both expensive and hugely damaging to the liver (that's why they are not used with normal strains). Even with them, your chances of survival are not great.
So, if you do happen to get TBC, don't fuck around wth it, be pedantic and take all the medication every day, without ever skipping a dose.
Sigged!
Yes, your n=1 is vital evidence.
Thanks.
fairly continuous contact with native Canadian employees
You betcha - my wife worked with native Canadians for quite a long while, and TB was absolutely rampant on the reserves. We both were tested more than once.
This looks like bad news in terms of bioterrorism. Terrorists could contract the disease and intentionally spread it among the populus.
you should stop interferon with my good time.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
With profits up in the corrections industry I'd venture to guess that TB will only grow right along with the Prison Industrial Complex. At the current rate of growth (in the US alone) we are looking at approx. 6,000,000 prisoners by 2020. That's a very modest figure, BTW.
From first-hand experience, TB is in love with prison. Most often, prisoners are either unable to get the medical assistance they need, especially when they are released (see: Punishment is profitable, reform is not). Others are simply uneducated regarding the risks they face when infected or the dangers they pose to others. Some simply don't give a shit, considering they're locked up in a cage year after year most likely (80% of the time) for a non-violent offense. TB is nothing new to prison. More prisoners==more TB.
_____ "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -- Orwell
Sounds far fetched, but this particular attitude in governments of far eastern countries is NOT uncommon. Typically the officials involved are more afraid that "sh*t happened on his/her watch" than the potentially devastating effect of the disease on the general population. The SARS epidemic is a clear example of this mentality. The last doctor spoke out against the ostridge mentality on recurring SARS infections in China was placed under house arrest. Really doesn't inspire confidence in human being as a specie...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycobacterium
The USA has a surpsingly high rate of infection for a Western nation, higher than most of North West Europe.
The US allows more legal immigrants than the rest of the world combined every year. This surely contributes to the TB rates.
After 20 years and I'm guessing millions if not billions of dollars in research have not even provided any kind of explanation of AIDS nor has the virus even been isolated.
Hunh? The HIV virus has been known since the 1980s. It's fully sequenced and numerous drugs have been designed based on the life cycle of the virus. I did a tiny amount of work on the protease inhibitor Crixivan back when I worked at Merck in the late 1980s. Merck had a crash program to crystallize HIV-1 protease to get the structure, followed by many attempts using computational chemistry to get an effective inhibitor. (I was a lab drone testing bioavailability of the wonder drug proposals they created.)
Just for fun, here's a photo of the virus: http://www.avert.org/pictures/hivvirus6.htm.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Saw this coming from 20 years ago.
I remember sitting in high school science class going over the details. Our Birkenstock-wearing teacher was probably breaking the rules by telling us what he'd learned. Darned socially aware hippies!
Livestock farmers mixing non-lethal doses of antibiotics into the feed to keep bacteria at controllable levels. (Creating bacteria breeding boilers.)
Junkies, who destroy their immune systems with their chemicals of choice, would normally die off fairly fast but for black-market/clinic-distributed, improperly used antibiotics. Concentrated junkie populations, like those I've walked among in Vancouver and Amsterdam are super-breeders for germs. Chilling and very real.
And then of course, there's the regular citizenry and drugs like 'Contact-C' which allow people to ignore symptoms which would normally put them in bed (where one can properly recover without drugs), and thus keep them at work where they spread the virus and wear themselves down further until a simple viral infection can graduate into a full-fledged bacterial bloom. --Then it's off to the doctor for antibiotics which many don't bother finishing properly once they feel their symptoms fading. --Doesn't matter how often you explain the Hows and Whys to a drone about why they HAVE to finish their antibiotics prescription. People who have been programmed to glaze over when confronted with important knowledge are both common and dangerous.
Humanity is getting exactly what it designed for itself.
Fortunately, ignorance is self-punishing and awareness protects those who choose to learn and act upon what they learn. --Viruses can be avoided if one has groomed their awareness, health and energy. I've not been sick in several years now, and I certainly don't manage it by allowing some drug-salesman 'doctor' to jab me with thimerosal/mercury-laced flu shots! (Which dull the brain, and I strongly suspect, reduce the strength of one's natural immune system, thus increasing the perceived need for just such profitable pharmaceuticals).
But you know, 'Science' is good and great and all that, precluding the need to question the intent behind the needle. Far too many people have traded their critical minds for easy, false trust and never question when they see the 'Science' label and hear an authoritative, soothing voice.
Remember; it's okay to be wrong. You will constantly be faced with false data if you choose the road of continual learning. Just be sure to correct it accordingly as you discover it. You WILL be punished for your mistakes by those who want to stop you from learning, but that's part of the journey. --In the long run, the lemmings are the ones who get sick, and they want your (enforced) company.
How much do you value your social acceptance?
-FL
Link is a shit stained person
= Grow a brain...
Most of the drug resistant TB in the US is coming from Mexican and other south americans. Same thing with some of the hepatitis.
Tamoxifen is also used to treat gynecomastia (breast development in men).
By any means. This is why they had entire sanitariums set up in the deserts of New Mexico before they figured out how to cure it. Consumption was sort of a big deal.
While I agree, IN GENERAL, that antibiotics are over prescribed, the problem is not the treatment, but the fact that patients are too STUPID to actually finish out their course. In fact, that's what's causing the problem with TB.
If you want to stay healthier, longer, please do feel free to avoid medications for minor infirmaries. But if you DO start taking antibiotics, take them all.
Period.
hmmmm?
I was in Russia a few years ago, and got to meet a family of Chechen refugees. Their children both had TB (in remission), and thankfully, there's still a bit of the old Soviet social medicine around. The kids spent most of their time in a sanitorium (not santorum - that's something really different) getting state-provided drugs.
But these were the lucky ones - they got out of Chechnya early, and managed to get a place in the hospital. If a Chechen tried that today, they'd probably get shot (after the recent hostage fiasco in the school). War provides an excellent breeding ground for infections diseases, and when that's coupled with shaky economies and ongoing conflicts... How can one hope to finish the treatment?
I just hope their both cured by now!
--LWM
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Major media are carrying the story that the UN is blaming much of the spread of drug resistant TB on the prevalence of AIDS/HIV-infection. This is due to the susceptibility of those populations to become infected and spread the disease to others.
Seastead this.
The thruth is there are places in the world where you are in danger of contacting a deadly form of TB. As noted, that's because even a little carelessness in taking antibiotics can help TB mutate into drug-resistant forms. At least, here in Romania, TB resistant to treatment has become a very serious threat. Don't understimate this, as it has the potential of changing the world as we know it.
--
I started with nothing and still have most of it left.
Sorry, I don't want to drag this off-topic into another screed about the evils of extended copyright, but it is mildly relevant.
My grandfather was a well-respected medical researcher. The works that he developed his fortune and reputation have been superceded, but toward the "mature" part of his career in the 1930's he did a lot of work on tuberculosis especially with animal tests on cattle. The articles my grandfather wrote are still under copyright. He's been dead for decades, and tuberculosis has been a non-issue for most Americans for years. Now that a more vicious strain of TB is starting to emerge, I find it disturbing that this material is still illegal to share.
If you can't see what I'm talking about, look at the two-digit year rollover problem framed in the media as Y2K. All of the research into the causes, identifications, and solutions to the "millenium bug" will remain under copyright for close to 90 years under current copyright law. Imagine though that copyright was extended yet again and these works weren't public domain until AFTER the next two digit rollover in 2100.
Just as people have already started to build two-digit years into databases again, so have people given up on many practices that might minimize the spread of TB. Some people can't even identify these practices or understand why they're at issue.
I realize that the research into Y2K and bovine tuberculosis isn't "gone" that it's still around under lease, but it seems that having only the choice of paying for out-of-date information on a tangential problem or recreating the works someone else did is a waste of resources (money or time) that could be better applied toward whatever problem is causing researchers to look back on these old issues.
I'm thinking about digging into my grandfather's work papers (what's left anyway) and trying to digitize some of his data, notes, and private letters on the subject of bovine TB. Some of this data probably can't be collected today because of regulations on animal testing that didn't exist in the 1930's. I know full well that it would be irrelevant to the current threat of drug resistant tuberculosis strains, but it might let some researchers or problem-solvers keep their money and time focused where the real problem is rather than paying/recreating old research.
While I'm not against people making money from their research and creative works, the length of time that this stuff remains under protection is absurd. The money made either for my family or the publishers trailed off to nothing decades ago. The potential monteary profit of his work is far outweighed by my own interests in not becoming a victim of a drug-resistant version of this affliction. The benefit of this work today is only as part of a contextual frame or foundation for research into other communicable diseases.
There is one more kind that people can get: Mycobacterium marinum . This is the mycobacterium that, as the name suggests, primarily infects aquatic critters such as fish and frogs. It seems one of the most common ways a person gets infected is through fishtanks. If your tank is contaminated and you're cleaning it out and your hands have open wounds you can get infected. The infection fortunately isn't nearly as bad as tuberculosis, as the bacteria tend to stay localized just under the skin. But the linked pagee does mention that it can hit the joints causing arthritis. Also like tuberculosis, you have a long treatment ahead of you to clear it up, on the order of two months.
There is a tuberculosis model system utilizing M. marinum and the zebrafish (Danio rerio) and a second one using M. marinum and Xenopus laevis, a frog. M. marinum model systems, despite being "hosted" by organisms that are evolutionarily quite distant from humans are pretty good, as M. marinum is very closely related to M. tuberculosis and the infection M. marinum causes in its natural hosts manifests pathological hallmarks of tuberculosis, including granulomas.
If I'm not mistaken, the TB problem was really solved by improved sanitation, and antibiotics were only used to treat cases that already existed. As long as we keep up sanitation standards, antibiotic resistant strains should will be a threat to the vast majority of us. I know this will come as little comfort to people living in third world countries, but most of the slashdot readership has nothing to worry about.
All infectious deseases work much faster, more efficiently among the weak, underfed, under or non-treated.
Increasing unequal wealth distribution, recently even among the most developed countries, like USA is creating a huge risk. People with money tend to think that they can buy immunity, by isolating themselved into gated communities. But if they take a cab, a subway, a flight, if they eat out, their immunity is very much in question.
Greed is a major factor in the increase of these deseases: feeding animals with antibiotics to have a bigger profit was a real stupid idea. Antibiotics production for animals is actually higher than for humans, however, when you are having that big juicy stake, you are also fed with the antibiotics that cow was eating, daily.
Countries which could defeat wide-spread TB, are the one, which had major change in the general well-being of their entire population.
With increasing travel, commerce deseases can spread very fast, virtually out of control. Just think of SARS and the crippling effect on the economy on even such highly developed city, as Toronto.
The best long term solution to fight these outbrakes is to create a wealth distribution in the society, which does not leave larger and larger segment of the population underfed, with living conditions which support the spread of deseases, with no medical testing and treatment.
You might think that who cares for example, about the criminals, dying untreated in prisons. But think again, prison stuff and everyone else, who gets in touch with prisons brings those deseases into your community. Among those might be the mail man, contractors, social workers, lawyers, nurses, doctors. You even get infected on jury duty, buy sitting in the same room with the untreated.
The solviets had a unique treatment for TB before the advent of Penicillian. Their favorite method was a phage that targeted the terbicillium bacteria.
In the US and some other countries the protocols for when to use Vancomycin (bad to use it for MSSA because it is less effective than methicillins) is reasonably well established. But elsewhere vancomycin isn't being as well-regulated. And now VRSA is showing up. In the US we also have quinupristin (good for people allergic to vancomycin). And there is one other antibiotic- Teicoplanin- which works as well as Vancomycin but isn't yet available in the US. And one more antibiotic in phase III trials...
And then that's it. Do you have a relative in a nursing home? Or who goes to the hospital regularly? 60% mortality.
As I'm still in the anger phase of grief I'll assign blame...
India does account for ~1/3 of the global tuberculosis cases. [pdf] . However, the prevention scheme in India has been largely a success.
This must be an old article - I think this is well known in the medical community now. It has been status-quo that Vancomycin was the only anti-biotic that was guaranteed to work.
I disagree with his 'op-ed' on the drug companies. Obviously, he has never worked for a drug company or a pharmacy. Vanco is *very* expensive. And it's dosage can run high. And drug companies aren't out looking for the next Vanco? That is categorically a FALSE statement.
Isoniazid didn't seem to do much to me. I can pound them down all night and be sober by the time the bars close, so i'm guess it didn't do much to my liver. The only thing it did do was make me want to throw up my stomach when I didn't follow directions to take it with food. (Good god this drug means it!)
I remembered to take it every day by giving my cat his pill at the same time. Unfortunately, my cat's pill and my pill looked identical. I'm pretty sure I mixed them up at least once. And Isoniazid has a side effect opposite from the purpose of the medication my cat was on. (It kind of darkens the urine) Heh.
Anyhow, I lived in Alaska most of my life. However bad you think TB is in California, Alaska's got it beat. My mother got it a year or so before I did. She probably got it at work. Her job involved travelling out to remote villages on occasion, where access to health care can be spotty, and education on the subject equally so. She or any of her coworkers could have brought it back. I think it's most likely I picked it up at her office, but it could have been anywhere.
You could completely close off immigration and tourism into the US, and you'd still not get rid of TB, because rural Alaska is an intractible reservior of it. No matter how aggressive the TB programs are in Alaskan cities, it'll still be lurking in the villages. And the resources don't exist to eradicate it everywhere.
Eventually the US is going to have to cave in (like most of the developed world) and realize that the risk posed by TB vaccines is less than the disease itself, because people in general are too goddamned ignorant and/or stupid to control it otherwise.
I remember trying to donate blood when I was in japan, but being prevented from doing so because of my TB status. (I've heard conflicting stories about whether I can donate blood in the US) It may have just been my inadequate Japanese, but I don't think he understood how TB is handled in the US, he just assumed everyone is vaccinated.
My mother (born '43) can remember her rural doctor from childhood saying antibiotics would end up causing us more trouble because "the bugs" would just adapt. It's not like this is some unforeseen phenomenon.
Yet what happened? In the US particularly, ABs were handed out just because patients asked for them, almost over-the-counter, frequently when ABs were useless for what they had or what they had was trivial. And aside from that, it screws up the bacteria we all carry in order to live, and kids get so much ABs (in their food if not prescribed) that their immune systems never bother to mature.
when we let big pharmaceutical companies take control of R&D.
The thing that concerns me most: ethics in big pharmaceutical corporations. Some googling around, taken with a grain of salt, can nonetheless scare you off. The problem isn't that some treatments or drugs reveal themselves to be ultimately dangerous for our body, I can consider it part of the process of finding new cures (if there was no negligence during the research, of course).
The scary stuff is that they behave like any other corporation, protecting their own interests above those of the consumers. Their resistance to low priced drugs in Africa is well known, but i've seen worse things. (IANADoctor so I cannot judge this link's claims).
Now, in case of the emergence of a global infection which can spread easily, like SARS or the new tubercolosis, the cure CANNOT be considered as a normal consumer good.
The cure must be made and sold with no profit margins by whoever has the means to. This is the only way I can imagine that makes the spread of such diseases a bad deal for everybody, pharmaceutical corporation included. It is way better if no one has economic interest to have some things happening. Corporations can still make a living out of less menacing diseases.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
It is an old article, yes. But it's still one of the most vivid discussions of antibiotic resistance in bacteria that I've read.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Obligatory potato link.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
In any case, though, in the olden days, they used isoniazid (abbreviated as INH). With emerging resistance, they started using two drugs simultaneously. And in this day and age, the first line of treatment for TB involves three drugs, usually INH, rifampin, and pyrazinamide (abbreviated as PZA.) A lot of times, though, we're super-cautious and use four drugs--either ethambutol or streptomycin, among others. None of these drugs are really used in treating other diseases--they're pretty specific for Mycobacterium. (So these drugs would be pretty good for leprosy and non-tuberculous Mycobacterial infections, too, but those organisms usually don't have the resistance profile that M.TB does, so we can usually go with less toxic drugs)
While misuse of antibiotics certainly is a major causative factor for why M.TB is so resistant, you've got to give the bug and evolution some credit too. TB is just so damn hard to kill. Your immune system can only really wall it off at best--without antibiotics, as soon as your immune system weakens, the bacteria just goes buck-wild, possibly causing disseminated disease like miliary TB or TB meningitis.
It is possible to live fine infected with TB as long as you have an intact immune system, but you're sort of like a ticking time bomb. Since immunity naturally wanes with age, when your old, you'll become contagious, and TB is really easy to transmit. Just think about all those people coughing in the subway or the elevator. Probability says you're going to run into one of them eventually.
But a lot of diseases don't require complicated dosing regimens. Pneumonia can often be treated by three days worth of azithromycin once a day. Uncomplicated urinary tract infections can also be treated in three days. Gonorrhea and syphilis pretty much only require one dose of antibiotics injected intramuscularly. It's really only in kids where the dosing regimens get crazy, sometimes requiring doses four times a day, for ten to fourteen days. That's where a lot of the drug resistance comes in, especially when insane parents demand antibiotics for their little kid's cold.
With regards to TB, though, you can be arrested for refusing to take your medications, for endangering the public. The more uncompliant patients will get DOT as mentioned above, and if you don't comply with that, you get admitted against your will for the duration of the therapy. (It's something like six or nine months, or maybe even a year--they keep lengthening it then shortening it then lengthening it then shortening it.) Your tax dollars at work, but I guess it's better than running into them on the subway or in an elevator when they're carrying around a strain that's resistant to all four of the commonly used drugs for treatment.
A lot of "boomer" icons aren't really boomers at all-Bob Dylan was born in 1941 which makes him more a "Silent Generation" type.
He spent nearly all of his education and adult working period at Rutgers, New Jersey, except for a small period 1-3 years, where he went to U. Cal. Nearly all of his important work was done in NJ
a ks man-bio.html
http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1952/w
..........FULL STOP.
Waksman was a professor at Rutgers, New Jersey, where he discovered the mycin (streptomycin,actinomycin) class of drugs and their effectiveness against TB. Streptomycin has been listed as one of the top ten inventions that has shaped the world (itnearly erradicated TB from the world back in the 30's 40's) Waksman bio.
..........FULL STOP.
M. avium usually doesn't pose a threat to people with intact immune systems, but it is a common AIDS-defining infection. There are also other Mycobacterium that are only usually found in AIDS like M. kansasii and M. scrofalaceum, but they pretty much paint the same picture.
The only problem is that being on interferon is an ordeal. I worked with a hepatologist for a month when I was a medical student, and the people with Hep C he had on IFN looked half-dead, worse than chemo patients. And I also ran into people who had active Hep C with millions of copies per deciliter of blood floating around their body who told me they felt a lot better now that they stopped their IFN. Of course, there were people who were doing wonderfully on IFN, so there's obviously something to it, but it's not for everyone with Hep C.
Over the last 25 years, public health funding in the west has been seriously cut back. Public health is a cost center. When it is working the way it should, nothing happens. People are healthy, there are no epidemics, the water is safe to drink, the food does not kill us, and people are informed and make rational choices concerning lifestyle.
.01 to .09 surveillance professionals per million people. Only five states had one or more water/food surveillance workers per million people.
Elected officials over the last 25 years have seen public health as a cost center rather than a vital part of the public good. Lulled by the fact that public health when it works, it does so silently and with out fanfare. A politician who is mainly concerned with the tax payer relief will use this lack of anything as justification to cut back public health funding.
This reflects the last twenty years the ascendancy of the individual over any sense or responsibility for a collective good. The individual is solely responsible for their own health and well being. This is to be contrasted with a quote from the dawn of the twentieth century, from Doctor Hermann Biggs, So broad is the construction of the law that everything which improperly or unnecessarily interferes with the comfort or enjoyment of life, as well as those things which are. strictly speaking, detrimental to health or dangerous to life, may become the subject of action on the part of the Board of Health."
Twelve years ago a the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists did a survey of all fifty states and U.S. territories. What was found:
- Only $74 million was being spent by all the states and territories for disease surveillance. Of the $74 million only $55,455 was spent on monitoring drug resistant bacteria.
- Twelve states had nobody monitoring for monitoring disease causing micro-organisms in food and drinking water. Thirty-four states had food/water monitoring professionals at a ratio of
All this information was cribbed from the book by Laurie Garrett, Betrayal of Trust, The Collapse of Global Public Health. ISBN 0-7868-6522-9.
There is a strain of TB called "W" that is resistant to so many drugs it is virtually untreatable. It was circulating in many jails in New York City in the early nineties. It was identified after a prison guard died of TB in 1991. In 1995 a strain of TB was identified in Tennessee that was extremely virulent. A person managed to spread it to 82 percent of all the people that he had shared air space with. Fortunately this strain responded to antibiotic treatment, so far.
To what extent would you favor raising taxes to ensure that public health was funded?
Research is what I doing when I don't know what I am doing - Werner von Braun
I'm not really up on the subject of TB resistance but I remember everyone in my year at school receiving a TB Vaccination. Are TB Vaccinations still helpful in producing resistance to the mutated strains of TB? If so surely we should be looking at implementing wider scale vaccination programs, in order to combat the spread of these strains.
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
I remeber seeing a documentary about this on PBS some while back. It basically covered how with the overcrowded russian prision system the disease spead like wildfire. It also said a lot of the inmates in these prisions were released before they finished their medication and this created many of the drug resistant strands of TB. But this covers more than TB, in a world where the miracle antibiotic gets rid of everything people usually don't finish all of their medication has this leaves some of the disease behind. We are then left with drug resistent diseases.
I should work for World Health. Maybe then they'd read my answer to germs. Not that they should need to. I researched my information from their own websites... For those of you who haven't seen my web page http://www.newpath4.com/theanswer.html you're in for a treat. Then there's a way to get extra germ-killing oxygen permeating our insides on http://www.newpath4.com/lungs101.htm . And the system for converting one's home to gathering more oxygen from a small home-attached greenhouse is on http://www.newpath4.com/AAINDEX/paget6.htm . The National Institute of Health is aware of my Work and my results. More people will hear my answers through SlashDot than thru World Health I guess. But I want to make something really crystal clear. Fish force so much oxygen through their body that the blood PLASMA CARRIES OXYGEN, not just the red blood platelets. WE CAN DO THAT TOO. In fact, when a person is admitted into a hospital that's exactly what they do when they put you in a forced-air hyperbaric chamber! It forces so much oxygen into the wound even if the blood flow is lacking, because it's carried thru the plasma liquid, and healing moves along at a very advanced clip. My systems are about making that AVAILABLE TO EVERYONE so we can fight off disease. And a nice side effect is that our ribcage, lungs & the rest of us can get ripped in the process. BTW, wanna know why everyone is so FAT? We don't get enough Oxygen to burn it proper. All that is going to change soon, and you guys don't need to be too overly concerned about TB. Unless, of course, no one sees fit to contribute to the cause... in which case, I guess you'll just have to depend on the good ol' World Health/NIH people who ignore the information they printed on their own website. Good Luck! Ever see a fish whose sides wasn't ripped with muscle? There's a reason for that. Please, read my pages. After you do, start writing the health folks or contribute to my Paypal or we just aren't going to survive at all.
That's harsh: shouldn't you put more responsibility on the shoulders of doctors and hospitals? Plus, sorry to say, patients who choose the wrong hospitals?
The drugs used for acute TB are on the order of grams per day, so an implant wouldn't work too well. But for preventative therapy (skin test but no real signs of disease) which only needs about 300 mg of isoniazid per day, it could be possible. Though for comparison, the Norplant system used six 36 mg implants over five years. Some sort of big depo shot every month might work, though.
Sigh you sound like a medic. If I had bigger balls I
might have done that. It hurts just knowing we can't
give easy answers for diseases like this.
But (going technical for a mo) in the real world
the things which produce antibiotics produce a big
chemical cocktail of other things. Most of those *seem* to be inactive. My gut instinct spells "shotgun". What do you think? I wonder if we
should look again at the crud that was in that
mold to begin with (hey you know what I mean..)
P.S: You should submit a script for this to the BBC.
Heck with their wondrous friends at WGBH they would make an *excellent* story on Horizon. or
the discovery channel. Personally, I'd like John Carpenter to direct it so people *REALLY* get scared. They need to. I'd hate to get this one.
I was homeless a couple of years back, and I practiced *avoiding* anywhere with loads of
other people. Hey, I don't want to end up like
Doc Holiday. (If I cough it's because I smoke).
Please scare people about this. They need to be.
> TB is a "white-man's disease" we in India were introduced to TB due some assholes
> coming over from the "developed" world in the 16th century.
"Thank you, come again" - Apu Nahasapemapetalan, Springfield Kwik-E-Mart
But I still blame people (ordinary or policy makers) who have no fundamental understanding of why they should only take an antibiotic to fight a susceptible bacteria. If you believe evolution then (tautologically) you believe in small changes in the gene pool over time. Small changes in environments cause small changes in the gene pool. Given enough organisms this leads to new characteristics in organisms or new species: furry elephants and naked apes and all that. And that One human with an infection equals enough organisms to have changes in the gene pool. So the person believing in evolution fundamentally understands why he/she should not mess around with antibiotics.
Anyone else (especially policy makers) who doesn't understand evolution is likely to make mistakes. Just like someone who really doesn't understand gravity, stress strain diagrams, etc is likely to make mistakes in judging construction safety. They might make lucky guesses, but they might make horrible errors. With antibiotics they're much more likely to feel complacent about how they fund research or how they treat themselves with leftover antibiotics. And if they didn't learn evolution they probably didn't have enough microbiology to learn that bacteria exchange genes: resistance in one species can get transfered to other species. Their ignorant bliss: my pain.