Live data from Hacker News

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

cjonline.com

331–340 of 424 posts

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

#331

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…

Kind of related to your point… I remember my maternal Grandmother was looking after me one day and I’d either missed or skipped my earlier vaccination appointment in school (which, I think was a BCG or booster, it was in the early 1990s). She was raised by her maternal Grandmother after her mother died from TB when she was 2 years old. Her father died of… something infectious when she was teenager (the oral history i…

> I think we’ve lived without these diseases for so long that some people (stupid, selfish people) simply think they don’t exist or pose a threat any more.

This is true beyond just vaccines. All too often hardships are forgotten, history is just old pictures and stories, and people who are too far disconnected from those real events and don't learn from history will just walk the same path, leading to the same hardships.

They all think that the world is better today so they're smarter or better than the old generations, that the world evolved so they're intrinsically prepared, so the pains of the past can't harm them. Ironically they're ignoring all the lessons and the tools that made the world better and are needed to keep it like that, and instead think things are better because they just are.

They'll skip any vaccines or support extremist regimes because they think the modern world is just immune to this, it's intrinsically and permanently "fixed". We have freedoms or don't get sick because we "just" have freedoms and don't get sick.

Having close family spending a lifetime paralyzed by the polio virus before a vaccine was widely available, or spending some of my life in the cold embrace of dictatorship really drove the point home for me about learning the lessons of history.

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

#332

John Green, author of "The Fault in Our Stars", "Turtles All the Way Down", "The Anthropocene Reviewed", and other fine books is releasing a book called "Everything is Tuberculosis." If you are interested in the topic or just like to read well-written prose, I recommend joining me in pre-ordering it.

For what reasons do you recommend it?

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

#333

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…

I just checked and it's not mandatory anymore in France, which probably absurd because there is a surge of tuberculosis due to migration and international travel

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

#334
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from TB, you could also call this "the tragedy of vaccination": vaccination causes the incidence of a life-threatening disease to become so low that people consider the vaccine to cause more harm than it prevents - until the vaccination rate becomes so low that the life-threatening disease is back.

You know, if everyone wrote a predator prey simulation from scratch, they would understand those oscillatory dynamics.

But if they also wrote genetic algorithms from scratch, and understood natural selection, they would also understand the concepts of selection pressure, and use it or lose it.

If they then also understood that 90% - 95% of the population effectively has natural immunity, they would seriously question the ethics of vaccination.

Should a number of generations be allowed to profit from the benefits of vaccination at the cost of a loss of natural immunity in the group? Are future members of the group less entitled to this ~95% immunity, because the current generations prefer ( 100% minus epsilon ) artificial immunity?

Its easy to win a referendum in the advantage of the existing population at the cost of future populations, if those future populations aren't born yet to contest and vote against it.

From Wikipedia page on Tuberculosis:

> Roughly one-quarter of the world's population has been infected with M. tuberculosis,[6] with new infections occurring in about 1% of the population each year.[11] However, most infections with M. tuberculosis do not cause disease,[169] and 90–95% of infections remain asymptomatic.[87]

From the above it is clear that vaccination programs for TB should be strictly considered private healthcare since it can help specific individuals at the cost of collective fitness vis-a-vis TB. Governments collectivizing private medicine at the cost of group fitness ranks among the most populistic things in existence. Think of how communist systems justify their methods by emphasizing doctors and medical systems.

What exactly does the ethical axiomatization of a collective thought system look like when they look down on the ~95% natural immunity handed to them from the prior generations and simultaneously have no qualms to hand down a lower percentage of natural immunity to the next generations!

I believe they have this mistaken gut feeling that their decisions can be rationally axiomatized, more out of group think and delegation "others smarter than me are choosing this so it is probably rational"; and they are simply unaware of the fundamental inconsistencies they manifest.

Tax payer money ought not be spent on reducing the natural immunity of its taxated population, regardless of how confronting it may be to explain to the population how a lot of methods in medicine were started long before the consensus on natural selection as the origin of life and fitness took hold.

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

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CDC is likely to be one of the primary sources for said media on national health issues like this.

This is a local health issue, the local equivalent is doing the work here.

Disease outbreaks have a tendency to not… stay local.

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

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a local health issue, the local equivalent is doing the work here.

Disease outbreaks have a tendency to not… stay local.

I’m sure the geniuses at the neighboring health authorities are perfectly capable of monitoring nearby conditions without falling back on federal intervention.

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

#337
post #214
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Here’s another example: would you start building a house today knowing the price of every input material might jump 20% to 200%?

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

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

An interesting aside to this is the MIS BAIR study in Melbourne, which is looking at whether the BCG vaccine reduces the incidence of food allergies, eczema and asthma. https://www.mcri.edu.au/research/projects/misbair

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

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or perhaps such outbreaks are more common than you'd expect and it's the equivalent of leaving a firewall down for a day? I think this + bad luck, really.

Luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. In this case lots of opportunity and zero preparation.

Well said!

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

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, if everyone wrote a predator prey simulation from scratch, they would understand those oscillatory dynamics.

But if they also wrote genetic algorithms from scratch, and understood natural selection, they would also understand the concepts of selection pressure, and use it or lose it . If they then also understood that 90% - 95% of the population effectively has natural immunity, they would seriously question the ethics of vaccination. Should a number of generations be allowed to profit from the benefits of vaccination at th…

>If they then also understood that 90% - 95% of the population effectively has natural immunity, they would seriously question the ethics of vaccination.

Your premise is flawed as this is a misinterpretation of what the data actually states. The statistic refers to the fact that most infections do not cause active disease. This is not the same as having "immunity." Rather, it indicates that the immune system in most individuals can contain the bacteria without eradicating it, resulting in a latent infection. Latent TB can become active under certain conditions, such as immunosuppression or aging.

Vaccination does not reduce natural immunity but aims to prevent the most severe manifestations of TB which can be fatal.

Your wider point re: the ethical argument against vaccination presumes that exposing populations to preventable diseases is acceptable to preserve a theoretical "natural immunity." However, ethics in public health prioritize the reduction of preventable harm. Sacrificing lives and health for a purist notion of "natural selection" disregards the suffering of individuals and the societal costs of disease.

If anything, the ethical failure lies in allowing preventable diseases to cause harm when safe, effective interventions exist. Future generations will inherit a world shaped by the decisions we make today. A world with widespread vaccination is one where fewer children die, fewer families suffer, and societies thrive.

Post reply on HN