fracas

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Tuberculosis. Disease of the past.

Or not.

In 2005, the United States recorded 14,500 cases of TB. [1]

“TB is spread through the air from one person to another. The bacteria are put into the air when a person with active TB disease of the lungs or throat coughs or sneezes. People nearby may breathe in these bacteria and become infected.

When a person breathes in TB bacteria, the bacteria can settle in the lungs and begin to grow. From there, they can move through the blood to other parts of the body, such as the kidney, spine, and brain.

TB in the lungs or throat can be infectious. This means that the bacteria can be spread to other people. TB in other parts of the body, such as the kidney or spine, is usually not infectious.

People with active TB disease are most likely to spread it to people they spend time with every day. This includes family members, friends, and coworkers.”

Or fellow passengers on a flight from New Delhi to Chicago…

By STEVE STERNBERG
USA TODAY
Dec. 31, 2007Health officials continued their 17-state search Sunday for passengers who may have been infected with a rare, potentially deadly form of tuberculosis by a woman on an American Airlines flight from New Delhi to Chicago.

The 30-year-old woman, a native of Nepal who now lives in Sunnyvale, Calif., had been diagnosed with drug-resistant TB in India, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta says. She was a passenger on Flight 293 from India to Chicago and flew on to San Francisco on Dec. 13.

About a week later, she checked in to the emergency room at Stanford University Hospital. “She was quite sick,” says Martin Cetron, director of global migration and quarantine for the CDC. “She was at the extreme end of the severity of the disease.”

Today, says Gary Migdol, a hospital spokesman, “she is stable and doing well.”

She was seated in row 35; 44 people sat close enough for possible exposure. From Chicago, they traveled to California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, elsewhere in Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and Virginia.

The CDC recommends that they all undergo testing… …read the rest.

TB is definitely not a disease of the past. While in the past we had awareness and sanitoiums, today, we have apathy, ignorance and drug-resistant TB.

The World Health Organization estimates that up to 50 million persons worldwide may be infected with drug resistant strains of TB. Also, 300,000 new cases of MDR-TB are diagnosed around the world each year and 79 percent of the MDR-TB cases now show resistance to three or more drugs. [2]

Some time ago, fracas brought news to you about a globe-trotting lawyer with drug-resistant TB. This USA Today article is a good refresher. Unless we want to return to the days where every family seemed to have a loved one away at a sanitorium, we owe it to ourselves to become educated about TB and stop thinking of it as a disease of the past. Global travel has made a disease long ignored by we in the developed world, something that while a throwback to the past, will once again become part of our future. In fact, our technological advances have made re-living days from the past, a real possibility. 

And that my friends, is irony.

[1] Questions and Answers about TB, 2007; CDC
[2] Multidrug-Resistant Tuberculosis Fact Sheet; American Lung Association

Image Sources: The colorized photo of Tuberculosis cultures found within the USA Today article (and displayed at fracas), is available also at ABC News, while a black and white version is available at County of Orange Health Care Agency: Public Health Bulletin. With no photo credit given at either ABC News or the County of Orange site, it is unclear who the rightful credit should go to. The USA Today article simply displays ‘CDC’ below the photo with no link to support that. My conclusion would be to credit the CDC. I will happily correct that if clearer evidence becomes available.