"When many cures are offered for a disease, it means the disease is not curable" -Anton Chekhov
''Once you tell people there's a cure for something, the more likely they are to pressure doctors to prescribe it.'' -Robert Ehrlich, drug advertising executive.
"Opinions are like sphincters, everyone has one." - Chris Rangel
Return of the White Plague: On the here and now beat ( as opposed to the what might be beat of avian flu), tuberculosis is gaining resistance:
A strain of virtually untreatable tuberculosis has been diagnosed, raising concern about a worldwide epidemic, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
The strain, known as extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis or XDR TB, resists all first-line drugs and three of the six classes of second-line drugs, the CDC said in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report released today.
No effective vaccine. Few effective drugs. Nineteenth century here we come. posted by Sydney on
3/25/2006 11:37:00 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
This disease is airborne, and can be caught simply by breathing in a shared air space.
When the United States changed its immigration rules to stop quarantining immigrants with active TB, we put ourselves at risk in a way nobody imagined at the time.
Because infected immigrants are now the major cause of TB in the United States, it's time to once again either ban people with active infections, or put them in mandtory treatment and quarantine.
A second vector of TB is AIDs patients, whose compromised immune systems make them more susceptible to the disease. Unfortunately, they and all others with active TB now MUST be treated and quarantined until in remission. Nobody's individual rights should supercede those of general society when a highly contagious, airborne disease is drug resistant.
