Zero testing. Homeland concern abdication.
What difference does it make?"
This is good information about detection, forms of disease and treatments. However, is there any exhaustive study into the sources (i.e., people/country) sources of this and other deadly heretofore-thought-erradicated diseases?
It just seems to me that as each year goes by in this country, we hear of untreatable forms of TB, flesh eating diseases, waterborne microbe infections, and other diseases like smallpox, bubonic plague and the like.
Myself, I can’t help but think that there is a valid connection between the re-emergence of these diseases and the influx of illegal aliens. Can’t prove it, but I believe it so.
Had it. 40 years ago. Was locked in a ward. They finally figured out it was atypical, and not a contagious type.
We have the AIDS population to thank for the resurgence.
A few things about TB:
The most common variety is still “ordinary” TB, but there is also resistant TB (RTB); multiple drug resistant TB (MDR-TB); extremely drug resistant TB (XDR-TB); and in India they found a type that was totally drug resistant (TTB), but it killed everyone infected by it, quickly, so it may have defeated itself.
As a rule of thumb, MDR-TB is very hard to treat, has a high mortality rate and needs hospital isolation. XDR-TB is almost always lethal, and you are in isolation until you die, then the entire room is sterilized. TTB kills so fast that treatment is not an option, just cremation.
TB is very hard to treat for an odd reason. Most bacteria reproduce about every half hour, but TB only reproduces about two or three times a day.
The typical TB (tine) test, just determines if you have been exposed to the disease. Exposure means you are infected, but the disease is still passive, waiting as long as a decade or two before going active.
With exposure, you need to take some drugs for a minimum of six months.
A positive tine test is followed up by a blood test, to see if your infection has gone active. If that is the case, then you need to take different drugs for several years.
Comparatively speaking, TB is very similar to Leprosy, belonging to the same genus, though different species.
TB is rather odd in that it can attack almost every organ in the body: the brains, kidneys, muscles, heart, bones and spine, but most often the lungs.
The second stage of the disease is manifested by destruction or “consumption” of the tissues of the affected organ. When the lung is affected, it results in diminished respiratory capacity, associated with other symptoms; when other organs are affected, even if treated adequately, it may leave permanent, disabling scar tissue.
Often TB patients are confined to wheelchairs when their spine is afflicted. Some go insane, some become hypersexual or hypercreative, some look normal and healthy and then keel over dead.
It is both unpredictable and unnerving, and the terror its epidemics inflicted in Europe and America resulted in the Gothic period, and much horror fiction and the obsession with morbidity. Likewise, the popular “Victorian look”, gaunt and pale, was an effort to look like the person had TB.
In the US, many of those afflicted moved to the desert southwest, which had many TB sanitariums, recognizable for their smokestacks, because they burned both their mattresses and linens.
With antibiotics, TB had been almost wiped out in the US. But no more.