Posted on 12/27/2009 5:45:56 PM PST by Publius804
LANTANA, Fla. – It started with a cough, an autumn hack that refused to go away.
Then came the fevers. They bathed and chilled the skinny frame of Oswaldo Juarez, a 19-year-old Peruvian visiting to study English. His lungs clattered, his chest tightened and he ached with every gasp. During a wheezing fit at 4 a.m., Juarez felt a warm knot rise from his throat. He ran to the bathroom sink and spewed a mouthful of blood.
I'm dying, he told himself, "because when you cough blood, it's something really bad."
It was really bad, and not just for him.
Doctors say Juarez's incessant hack was a sign of what they have both dreaded and expected for years — this country's first case of a contagious, aggressive, especially drug-resistant form of tuberculosis. The Associated Press learned of his case, which until now has not been made public, as part of a six-month look at the soaring global challenge of drug resistance.
Juarez's strain — so-called extremely drug-resistant (XXDR) TB — has never before been seen in the U.S., according to Dr. David Ashkin, one of the nation's leading experts on tuberculosis. XXDR tuberculosis is so rare that only a handful of other people in the world are thought to have had it.
"He is really the future," Ashkin said. "This is the new class that people are not really talking too much about. These are the ones we really fear because I'm not sure how we treat them."
Forty years ago, the world thought it had conquered TB and any number of other diseases through the new wonder drugs: Antibiotics. U.S. Surgeon General William H. Stewart announced it was "time to close the book on infectious diseases and declare the war against pestilence won."
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
but I remember out here in the west of several cases of drug resistant TB
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The TB referred to in this article is resistant to even more drugs than resistant TB. That is why they call it XXDR.
XXDR is bound to come in eventually with an American who has contracted the disease on vacation or business abroad.
Your killing me...I cant reason or argue with you guys anymore. I give up. You win, there is no distinction between citizens and non-citizens in this matter. Let in everyone from anywhere, without tests, screenings or interviews. Then let them all live in your town and breath on you in your subway...etc, etc, etc...like I said..who cares..right?
Look what we got here in NH :(
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2416011/posts
I cannot think of a valid reason why a 19-year-old Peruvian needs to be visiting to study English. Don’t they have books in Peru? But it doesn’t matter. I say strap a copy of Rosetta Stone on his back and catapult him over the border into Mexico.
You cannot reason with me because you are not reasoning. You tried to make this an issue of illegal immigration, and I explained to you why it is not.
That’s right! Who would think of visiting Germany to study German? Idiots.
You know, sometimes I just have to wonder about folks and their tendency to be a ding-dong. If I was studying French, I probably would want to go to France, or anywhere else, if I was studying their language and culture.
Really, Ugly, you need to get out and about in the world just a little bit more, maybe try the next block, or city, even...
Hey, look man - It’s just not FAIR (!!!) that other people have to live in shitty Third World hellholes and die early from vicious diseases, when all we have to do to level the playing field is let them all come in here unexamined with their pestilence in tow to infect the rest of us. Where’s your compassion? Where’s your humanity? Where’s your politically correct public school education? Huh?
Me? Perhaps I’ll start leveling the playing field myself - might make a nice little voodoo doll of this dude’s mother, and some XXDR-mojo’d pins and salves to start playing with. That’ll be FAIR (!!!).
And Obambi might be up for a trip to Austria to study Austrain.
If it takes two years for us to be told about the first case, how long would it be before we'd be told half the country had it?
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