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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

#271

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

wahern wrote: post #248
lazyasciiart wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rubbish, on all counts. Public health discussion constantly gives rates and percentages, not just numbers. And “they’ve been warning us so many times” - well, I hope you’ve also given up on applying security updates to any software or hardware you manage, since those have been getting issued forever, they must be crying wolf too.

The 2023 incidence rate per 100k is 2.9. That's an increase from 2019, but also the same rate as 2014 and 2016. https://www.cdc.gov/tb-surveillance-report-2023/tables/table... (via https://www.cdc.gov/tb-surveillance-report-2023/summary/nati... ) My point isn't that agencies don't report incidence; my point is about when the discussion surfaces how it's discussed in the popular press, including editorializations in p…

The point is that if we'd put in a bit more effort 40 and 30 years ago, there would be 0 cases today (and if we put a bunch more effort in now, there will be 0 cases in 20 years). TB is awful, but it is curable and preventable. It's current existence in the world is a policy choice of the past few decades, and eradicating it is a choice we can make today.

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

#272

Post by AngryData »

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…

What kind of natural treatments? Because tuberculosis has been a massive problem from the start of human civilization up until the advent of antibiotics, and they tried every natural medicine and treatment under the sun because of how long people can end up living with it before dieing, and they accomplished pretty much nothing in stopping it. In fact it continued to get worse throughout that entire time, at one point being the cause of death for 25% of Europeans.

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

#273

Post by hyeonwho4 »

cheaprentalyeti wrote: post #219
userbinator wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I went skiing in Korea during the next to last weekend of Feb 2020. Best skiing of my time there, because the mountain was already empty of people due to public concern. By that time we were already wearing N95 masks: I remember discovering it was very hard to talk with both a ski mask and an N95 on.

By mid Feb, Korea was already covertly acquiring mask materials and preparing a ramp up in testing. I believe we had working PCR tests in my local hospital by mid March, and mask rationing in April. This made me very skeptical of the competence of the US public health establishment.

Edit: Skiing was Feb 21 to 23, just before Daegu locked down. The Mask rationing started early March: https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=292662

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

#274

Post by classichasclass »

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?

Quantiferon is the test you're thinking of, and is now preferred for most individuals, even those who haven't had BCG.

- TB physician since 2006

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

#275

Post by dang »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #244
aliasxneo wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would argue that being rabidly apolitical while a dangerous threat to western democracy has been growing in America for years is the rough part. Some of us are just here as technology professionals looking to learn and keep current on the latest trends. There's nothing wrong with that.

Some yes, but maybe not you? Because you used the following language yesterday: "Only a few short months ago, I was under constant attack from various public members of the Democratic party for being a white male with center-right views. The vitriol was quite unhinged, really." when asked for specifics you went to '...on CNN for example'.

Digging up people's comments from unrelated threads* starts to cross into personal attack. Please don't do that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* edit: I mean for use as ammunition in an argument. It's not that you're wrong—it's just that the cost (to the intended spirit of the site) outweighs the benefit (being right in an argument).

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

#276

Post by dang »

declan_roberts wrote: post #60
ceejayoz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention started monitoring and reporting tuberculosis cases in the U.S. in the 1950s.

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

They don't write the headlines.

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

#277

Post by dang »

ceejayoz wrote: post #12
levocardia wrote: post #8

How can this possibly be America's largest TB outbreak in history? TB was killing thousands of people per year in America in the 1800s.

> She noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention started monitoring and reporting tuberculosis cases in the U.S. in the 1950s.

Ok, we've put the CDC up there instead. Thanks!

Edit: actually let's put the 1950s up there instead. I think there's more information that way.

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

#278

Post by Animats »

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 BCG vaccine does exist, but it's an 90 year old live-virus vaccine with short-term side effects. Because it's a live-virus "natural" vaccine, it can't be used on people who are immunocompromised or have HIV. There's work on more modern vaccines.[1] No big successes yet.

The safety record of the BCG vaccine, in terms of permanent harm, is pretty good. But a normal side effect is "The usual expected reaction to BCG vaccination is redness and/or a small lump at the injection site, followed by a small ulcer (open sore) a few weeks later (usually less than 1 cm in diameter). The ulcer may last from a few weeks to months before healing to a small flat scar."[2] Mass vaccination will have parents screaming "my perfect baby has an open sore from the vaccine" on Instagram, with pictures.

The classic live-virus smallpox vaccine has similar side effects, by the way, plus a death rate of 1-2 per million.

Huge political problem. Remember all the screaming about the COVID vaccines, which are pure RNA, can't replicate, and have fewer side effects.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3349743/#s6

[2] https://www.rch.org.au/uploadedFiles/Main/Content/immunisati...

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

#279

Post by hinkley »

SecretDreams wrote: post #200
netman21 wrote: post #48

Largest in recorded history is a bit of hyperbole. In the 1800s something like 80% of all Americans had the TB bacillus and of those that came down with TB a huge percentage died.

Hopefully we can course correct before we have to relearn lessons from the 1800s.

Maybe if we learned about the 1800’s in school things would be going better now.

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

#280

Post by hinkley »

lolinder wrote: post #167
netman21 wrote: post #48

Largest in recorded history is a bit of hyperbole. In the 1800s something like 80% of all Americans had the TB bacillus and of those that came down with TB a huge percentage died.

Yeah, the phrase they were looking for is "largest on record", or more precisely "largest in the CDC's records". "Recorded history" has a very specific definition that places it in contrast with "prehistory": it's the time period in which we have written records of any sort, as opposed to the time period in which there is no surviving writing. That both phrases have "record" in them doesn't make them synonymous.

Largest means a very different thing when the us population is 40 million versus 400m.

What’s a heinous tragedy in one could be an existential threat in the other.

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