1 post tagged “bay area vulnerable to tb epidemic”
Last year, tuberculosis increased in four of the Bay Area's five largest counties, and the San Jose area in 2006 had the highest TB rate of any large American metro area, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
From the bodies of Peruvian mummies to 21st-century tech workers,
tuberculosis has been mankind's dark partner for centuries — a highly
infectious disease that never followed the path to eradication of
smallpox and polio. One in three people worldwide are infected, and 1.7
million died last year, mostly in poor countries where people lack the
access to detection and treatment available in the United States.No case of TB is easy. The waxy-sheathed, rod-shaped,
slow-growing bacteria, if untreated, colonizes the lungs, creating such
dense cavities of disease that pieces must sometimes be excised. TB
spreads through the air; untreated, one person infects 10 to 15 people
a year, according to the World Health Organization.But among public health officials, nothing is more worrisome
than the relative handful of drug-resistant TB cases. WHO and U.S.
experts are warily watching the record level of such cases — found from
former Soviet prisons to remote provinces in China — as hints of
something even scarier on the horizon."It worries me that we're going to have increased cases of
multi-drug resistance because we have no control over the rest of the
world," said Dr. Marty Fenstersheib, the public health officer for
Santa Clara County, which has had a 21 percent jump in TB cases since
2005. San Mateo County saw an 11.2 percent increase from 2006, and is
the only county in the state whose numbers have increased for five
consecutive years."The person on the street, when you go up to them and say,
'Do you know what one of our major problems is?' and they guess
everything else and you go, 'Tuberculosis,' and they go, 'No. We still
have TB? We have that?"'Treating one drug-resistant case can easily cost several
hundred thousand dollars or more — the bill often ends up with the
county health department if a patient lacks insurance. And in a growing
number of extremely resistant cases — including a few in the Bay Area —
there are no drugs that can cure the disease, raising the specter of an
infectious, incurable, potentially fatal infection.SOURCE OF THIS STORY
