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

cjonline.com

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

#251

Post by BeetleB »

ksenzee wrote: post #155
mhandley wrote: post #51

Not being from the US, I find it odd that the article didn't mention anything about vaccination. Until 2005, pretty much everyone in the UK received the BCG vaccine. After that the TB rate fell too low to merit routine vaccination, but even today it's still given routinely in a few areas where the rate merits it, or if there's elevated risk of exposure via family from abroad, etc. Has vaccination in general become su…

It’s a valid question, but I don’t think the current vaccine-unfriendly climate in the US is the reason why the BCG vaccine wasn’t mentioned. BCG wasn’t routinely given in the US even in the last half of the 20th century when vaccines were universally popular. I was surprised to learn a TB vaccine even existed when I started a public health−adjacent job in the 2000s. Our public health establishment just isn’t convinc…

The US medical community never accepted the effectiveness of that vaccine. They don't think it does a good job at prevention and it makes it harder to detect as anyone whose had that vaccine treats positive with the skin test.

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

#252

Post by BeetleB »

throwup238 wrote: post #216
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.

That's silly. There's a globule test that doesn't give a false positive for vaccinated people. Perhaps it's more recent than when you last had to go through this?

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

#253

Post by mjmsmith »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #246

I have a lot of disagreements with HL Mencken, but I’ve found myself thinking about this quote of his a lot lately…for whatever reason. “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

"As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people."

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

#256

Post by GeekyBear »

wahern wrote: post #233
GeekyBear wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the type of thing that'd normally show up on CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report The resurgence of TB has been the big story in infectious diseases for a while now. Globally: > The World Health Organization (WHO) today published a new report on tuberculosis revealing that approximately 8.2 million people were newly diagnosed with TB in 2023 – the highest number recorded since WHO began global TB mon…

> The resurgence of TB has been the big story in infectious diseases for a while now. It's been a big story since the 1980s, IIRC. I remember in college in the 1990s a biologist friend explaining that TB was the greatest disease threat to public health and it was being completely ignored. Frankly, it's hard to get worked up about it. Notwithstanding that it is a serious public health threat, there's a strong politica…

> Frankly, it's hard to get worked up about it.

A common bacteria with airborne spread and extremely drug resistant variants in the wild can hardly be characterized this way.

However, it's extremely fair to say that this is not a new issue that has only become apparent over the past week.

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

#257

Post by ars »

tzs wrote: post #230
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.

I don't know if any of these would count as being significantly sized, but Japan, Australia, and South Korea handled it a lot better than the US [1] when it comes to deaths per 100k. Interestingly, Australia and South Korea did have more cases per 100k than the US[2]. [1] https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr... [2] https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...

So basically it's good to be an island?

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

#258

Post by vtashkov »

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…

Last week it was still the job of the previous administration to publish it and it was the last administration which created the problem in the first place. Ideological purification was also what the previous administration has done quite a lot by hiring people based on their sexual preference, skin colour, gender and other irrelevant to the job characteristics.

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

#259

Post by jaybrendansmith »

Dalewyn wrote: post #210
lynndotpy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>I think it's fair to say a lot of Trump's apologists and defenders really did not understand the ramifications of his first presidency, and are not in a position to clearly anticipate the ramifications of his second presidency. Speaking as one Trump voter among many others, I knew exactly what he accomplished in his first term and what a hypothetical second term could look like. I also understood what his campaign p…

[flagged]

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

#260

Post by throwup238 »

BeetleB wrote: post #252
throwup238 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's silly. There's a globule test that doesn't give a false positive for vaccinated people. Perhaps it's more recent than when you last had to go through this?

What’s the name for that test?

I last had one in the late 2000s

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