Drug resistant TB 'at new high' (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Imogen Foulkes
BBC News, Geneva

Drug resistant tuberculosis has hit the highest levels ever recorded, according to a report on the disease from the World Health Organisation (WHO).

In a survey of over 90,000 TB patients in 81 countries, the WHO found that levels of multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB were far higher then expected.

The survey also found cases of extensively drug resistant TB which is virtually untreatable in 45 countries.

The findings have taken the organisation by surprise.

MDR-TB is resistant to at least the two most powerful anti-TB drugs, isoniazid and rifampicin.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7265464.stm

[mac2]

1. This is what happens when third world people travel

without testing. There is no stop gap like Ellis Island. What are they thinking?

Ellis Island people who were sick were treated (rich or poor). If they didn't recover they were returned to their home. It was not our fault that those countries don't take care of their own.

We can't treat illegals who don't seek medical help or even know they have TB.

[HereSince1628]

2. This is what happens when in rich countries poor people take half

their medication to make them stretch twice as far.

Everyone being on their lonely fucking own is great until the problems spreads from being a problem for individuals and becomes a problem for a population, or worse many populations.

It actually takes very little for wealthy foreign visitors to leave the US with an awful infection.

[End Of The Road]

3. And when poor people in poor countries

Have limited access to very expensive drugs.

[Warpy]

4. And when poor people in rich countries

have NO access to expensive drugs.

Healthcare isn't just a human rights issue, it's a species survival issue.

Keep denying the poor and sick access to care, eventually the bugs are going to jump from them to YOU.

[HereSince1628]

5. Most rich countries have had a vaccine for TB.

And it is not a perfect vaccine...

But in the US, a rich country, people who get TB get public health departments to provide medications. The problem is a culture in which the poor scrimp and stretch medications. Doing it with TB meds is just a leaf in the same book.

And low dosages just select for greater resistance in the bacilli.

Xenophobia needn't be a part of the US policy to gain an upper hand on TB.

[mac2]

6. But TB has become resistant to the present drugs

Our government has not funded the CDC so they can follow these diseases. They need to be isolated and treated with new drugs as they mutate. TB coming from foreign lands might not even be the same.

We defeated Small Pox by isolating it. We need to do the same with most disease that have mutated and are contagious.

[HereSince1628]

7. You wrote "they" need to be isolated...who or what is "they"?

Is they TB or is they people, foreign people, who are TB positive?

TB has become drug resistant as TB survived treatment at low doses of the medication used against it.

I have a bit of personal history with TB. When I was 12 my father was put in a "sanitarium" in North Aurora Illinois because he had TB. He lost 1/4 of his right lung to what is best called a primitive treatment of unecessary surgerical intervention.

As a "Tine Test" positive I was forced to take drugs not approved for children. A regimen of drugs which gave me sterile bowel syndrome and had me sick for months.

We lived in a working-class neighborhood of a suburb of Chicago. I was a student with only other little caucasian kids. My father was a janitor at a different elementary school that also only enrolled little caucasian kids and which only had a caucasian faculty.

TB is NOT a disease that is only from foreigners and "dirty" elements in our society. It pisses me off greatly to think that sort of stupidity is still floating around a "modern" country.

TB is indeed a bacterial infection. The US chose not to employ a vaccine against it.

In the US medical policy is to treat it with drugs which because of the nature of the evolution of drug resistance has selected bacteria populations to become resistant to treatment.

Drug resistance often follows inadequate dosage and interrupted dosages. I know firsthand how bad the side effects of some of those drugs are. I know that people, especially asymptomatic people, don't follow through on completing drug regimines. In the US poverty contributes to the development of habits which short-cut drug regimes in order to save money. Poor people don't need to be isolated. Poor people need to be given adequate dosages AND everyone who takes these meds (rich and poor alike) needs to be educated to the importance of completing the treatment on schedule in order to slow the development of drug resistance.

[mac2]

8. Areas of the world where TB is out of hand

We need to ID the different strains and make new drugs to fight them. The World Health Organization and the CDC have to have funds to do it.