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Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is America's largest recorded since the 1950s

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Re: Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is America's largest recorded since the 1950s

#211

Post by eth0up »

tbrownaw wrote: post #182
eth0up wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Treating it casually has led to widespread resistance. I have long suspected this as part of why the subject isn't much discussed, despite being more prevalent than most realize. The elephant here is (aside from latent infection) the atypically long duration of treatment, which can exceed 6 months and is harsh. Many, even otherwise responsible people, will founder before the proper end of treatment and this, I think…

> It's probably time we start looking a bit harder for "natural" or alternate treatments. Is the idea that a different label would lead to higher compliance rates?

Resistance. It's not quite the end of the world if TB becomes impervious to, say, catnip or whatever, which isn't front line medicine. And some options might have a more mechanical rather than biological mechanism/function.

Compliance for a 6 month course of just about anything is difficult and more so for something that may seem asymptomatic. Oozing sores, foul oders and overt discomfort would probably help, but alas...

Re: Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is America's largest recorded since the 1950s

#212

Post by scythe »

eth0up wrote: post #62
ceejayoz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is treatable with antibiotics. Treating it casually has led to widespread resistance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidrug-resistant_tuberculos... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensively_drug-resistant_tub... > People with an active infection feel sick and can spread it to others, while people with a latent infection don't feel sick and can't spread it. https://www.who.int/teams/global-tuberculosis-programm…

>Treating it casually has led to widespread resistance. I have long suspected this as part of why the subject isn't much discussed, despite being more prevalent than most realize. The elephant here is (aside from latent infection) the atypically long duration of treatment, which can exceed 6 months and is harsh. Many, even otherwise responsible people, will founder before the proper end of treatment and this, I think…

>It's probably time we start looking a bit harder for "natural" or alternate treatments. Some in medical journals, are under scrutiny, but inconclusive.

We are looking, quite hard, in fact. Mycobacterium tuberculosis is among the most studied microörganisms.

Like HIV, it is notable particularly for being able to defeat the attempts of the immune system cells to kill it, and it in fact infects and reproduces within macrophages. Medical researchers have done a lot to understand how this is possible and we (as in humanity) have identified several enzymes and related biomolecules which seem to be crucial to this process, which we might be able to inhibit with a targeted drug.

However, all of this scientific research has the usual problem that it is very difficult and expensive. In order to inhibit the enzyme, the drug must be absorbed by the body, and then make its way into the macrophages, and then it still must be active, and have no other toxicity to the host. It is easy to say "just inhibit isotuberculosinol synthase", but it is much harder to do.

As I understand it, this is also the reason why treating tuberculosis requires such long courses of antibiotics. When treating a normal infection, we are basically just killing most of the pathogens, and we hope that the immune system will mop up the rest. In the case of M. tuberculosis, the drugs have to kill all of the bacteria, which is why multidrug therapy is basically always used and the patient must continue treatment long after symptoms seem to have disappeared. Even when patients have recovered, they are always considered to be at risk of still having latent tuberculosis, which is why hospital screenings often feature a question like "have you ever had a positive test for tuberculosis?"

Re: Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is America's largest recorded since the 1950s

#213

Post by wyldfire »

lanternfish wrote: post #195
declan_roberts wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But surely our disease experts know about the past outbreaks and their impact and wouldn't say something patently untrue like the headline.

"Recorded history" in the title refers to the period of history where the agency has been recording the numbers. It might not be the best phrasing, but it's not strictly untrue; the underwritten thesis (TB is on the rise) is still supported by the evidence.

"recorded history" sounds like it's how you divide pre-colonial Americas from modern (15th Century CE onward) Americas. For example, many weather features have been recorded in the Americas since 17th century CE. Does "recorded history" refer to only "[this particular metric's] recorded history"?

Re: Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is America's largest recorded since the 1950s

#214

Post by mulmen »

_yb2s wrote: post #149
intermerda wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I’m an academic scientist part of a really large government funded research grant that employs hundreds of people. Last time, we had to fire half our staff immediately right up front because they said they were cutting our funding. They ended up not cutting our funding at all, but we had already fired everyone so it was lose lose- the Government spent the money but the research couldn’t be done. Just plain bad leader…

Sounds like bad leadership on the part of your project. To outsiders that don’t understand the details why fire people before the actual budget cuts?

Re: Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is America's largest recorded since the 1950s

#215

Post by ty6853 »

wumeow wrote: post #109
et-al wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Trump offered tangible things while the opponent offered a much more though out philosophy and platform (even if one i disagree with).

The fact Trump offered to pardon Ross was enough to make me feel incredibly guilty for not voting for him. I was surprised he found a way to get to me like that, but reality and practical negotiation can be quite persuasive over ideology.

I suspect Trump had at least one important thing to enough people that is 100% achievable and physically real-- a part of a wall, a pardon, a $2000 -- that he could beat out someone offering ideas/hopes/dreams.

Re: Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is America's largest recorded since the 1950s

#216

Post by throwup238 »

3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #113

I had a TB scare last year. Coworker was exposed to a confirmed case. Got tested, and we all turned up negative. I then asked if I could get a TB vaccine, but was told no, because it makes the TB visual assessment test useless. So, to aid future potential diagnoses, I need to be able to be infected by the genuine article.

Can confirm. I got the vaccine in the Soviet Union as a kid and tested positive in the US for school admission and when volunteering with special kids. It’s a huge pain in the ass every time because doctors insist on a course of antibiotics that is particularly hard on the liver or kidneys so I have to spend significant time fighting them and getting an exception from administration.

Re: Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is America's largest recorded since the 1950s

#217

Post by gonzobonzo »

llamaimperative wrote: post #4

This is the type of thing that'd normally show up on CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report which has been published weekly since 1960 (my understanding is this is without fail). But unfortunately the current administration has decided an ideological purification is more important than keeping the American public apprised of threats to their health. So it wasn't published last week, and probably won't be this we…

> This is the type of thing that'd normally show up on CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report which has been published weekly since 1960 (my understanding is this is without fail).

> But unfortunately the current administration has decided an ideological purification is more important than keeping the American public apprised of threats to their health.

Looking at the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, this doesn't actually appear to be true. Going by that link you can read past MMWR reports, and they aren't (from everything I can see) doing weekly tracking of outbreaks, but rather publishing various articles about diseases the way a science journal would. I couldn't find anything about the Kansas tuberculosis outbreak in the most recent reports, so I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see anything about it in the next few MMRW reports.

Re: Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is America's largest recorded since the 1950s

#218

Post by o11c »

School-Cotton wrote: post #148
hedora wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cutting resources often is the root cause for an outbreak. - SARSv2 (aka Covid-19) happened after Trump disbanded the team that contained SARSv1. - During COVID, the west suspended polio vaccination programs in developing regions, so now polio outbreaks are a thing again. - Antivaxxers in NYC caused a massive measles outbreak a few years ago. Etc, etc.

Covid was spreading in many countries before the US. Off the top of my head I remember China, Korea, Italy and Spain. And no country of significant size avoided it, regardless of whether they were led by Trump or not.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. No country avoided it entirely, but a lot of them managed to get rid of at least half the deaths (keep in mind that that's with still with individuals people being rebellious), sometimes more.

Excess mortality per capita is the useful number to look at, since it's immune to scaling problems and the "but diagnosis!" argument. Although it may include "too scared to go to the doctor", that can't be too much of a contribution since that contribution shouldn't spike so much. Let's look at some numbers, smearing the spikes:

* in 2020-2021, South Korea's and Japan's excess death rate hovers below 5%

* in 2020-2021, Canada's, France's, and Germany's excess death rate hovers around 10%

* in 2020-2021, the US's excess death rate hovers around 20%

* in 2020-2021, Spain and the UK have spikes so high (but narrow) that I'm not even going to try to average it out. I would guess they're somewhere near the US for 2020 but better in 2021.

* in 2022, South Korea finally had a bad spike, but averaged over the year it's still only maybe 20%.

* in 2022, in almost all countries it hovers around 10%, and the timing of the swings is very similar between countries

* in 2023, in all countries it hovers around 5%

Source: first chart of https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid ; I've done the calculus by eye with rounding since I don't want to look up billions of numbers to do the math the hard way.

(Frankly, Korea and Japan did even better than these numbers say, since their population is skewed elderly in the first place)

Re: Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is America's largest recorded since the 1950s

#219

Post by cheaprentalyeti »

userbinator wrote: post #189
School-Cotton wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covid was spreading in many countries before the US. Off the top of my head I remember China, Korea, Italy and Spain. And no country of significant size avoided it, regardless of whether they were led by Trump or not.

People strongly recommended closing the US borders in the early stages of the pandemic, but they were dismissed as racists.

I can show multiple videos up to the end of Feb 2020 where Anthony Fauci said this wasn’t something to be too worried about, it was going to probably remain under control…

Re: Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is America's largest recorded since the 1950s

#220

Post by TylerE »

Waterluvian wrote: post #66
llamaimperative wrote: post #4

This is the type of thing that'd normally show up on CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report which has been published weekly since 1960 (my understanding is this is without fail). But unfortunately the current administration has decided an ideological purification is more important than keeping the American public apprised of threats to their health. So it wasn't published last week, and probably won't be this we…

I wonder if we’d do better in discourse to stop pointing at an “administration.” It is a reflection of what a plurality, often majority, of people want.

Less than 31% of people voted for this administration. So no, it isn't.
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