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Florida Accused of Concealing Worst Tuberculosis Outbreak In 20 Years
NotSanguine writes "The state of Florida has been struggling for months with what the Centers for Disease Control describe as the worst tuberculosis outbreak in the United States in twenty years. Although a CDC report went out to state health officials in April encouraging them to take concerted action, the warning went largely unnoticed and nothing has been done. The public did not even learn of the outbreak until June, after a man with an active case of TB was spotted in a Jacksonville soup kitchen. The Palm Beach Post has managed to obtain records on the outbreak and the CDC report, though only after weeks of repeated requests. These documents should have been freely available under Florida's Sunshine Law."
You tell em jmorris42. This wouldn't have happened if there were Republicans in the White House!
But don't worry, this is all the evil Republican's fault. ObamaCare^WTax will fix all these problems.
if only. Medical care can only provide you care if you get it. If you refuse to go to the doctor, or if you refuse to get vaccines or refuse antibiotics TB is going to do bad things to you.
This is compounded by the nature of TB in the west in in general. It's sufficiently rare that most people only get vaccinated for it when they're young, and don't get boosted, the vaccine does make it hard to test for exposure to the actual disease.
I think there's probably some legitimate blame on the US health system, (and the state of florida in particular obviously) closing hospitals and not having universal care does make thing worse than they could have been, but it's not like countries with universal care won't have problems with people who don't get treatment, or who don't follow it.