Ruxin: TB Bigger Problem Than Just That Groom
Josh Ruxin, the Assistant Clinical Professor of Public Health at Columbia, says that although only 17 people in the US have come down with Multidrug Resistant TB in the last seven years, it is a huge problem throughout Africa.
"In sub-Saharan Africa where roughly 25 million people are HIV positive, nearly half will develop TB. If treatment is not well administered, these cases will lead to new strains of resistant TB. There is a direct connection between the AIDS pandemic, TB, and the failure of health systems to appropriately diagnose and treat these diseases."
Ruxin adds that while Congress is holding hearings on Andrew Speaker, the man who made tuberculosis a household word (again), "It is important that [we] not miss the larger frame his case reveals: in an age of global jet travel, there is no such thing as an isolated case. TB anywhere is TB everywhere. —BRIAN FAIRBANKS
Josh Ruxin: What the TB Scare Teaches Us [Huffington Post]
[Photo: Getty Images]
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TB may be bigger than Andrew Speaker, but he is still a colossal jerkface.
Just this week, a woman with TB in Monroe County, Indiana was quarantined for "repeatedly refusing to avoid contact" with other people. What are these people thinking?
is that photo from the Schipol airport in Amsterdam? just got back from there.
"It is important that [we] not miss the larger frame his case reveals: in an age of global jet travel, there is no such thing as an isolated case. TB anywhere is TB everywhere.Didn't we learn from Patient Zero during the first years of the AIDS crisis?
(For any reader too young to remember, he was a flight attendant who frequented public bathhouses - he has the dubious honor of being credited with much of the early spread of the HIV virus, because he was so promiscuous over so much of the globe.)
Good, grief. I read the headline as Ruxpin: Teddy Bear...