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You may have gathered, gentle reader, from some of my posts that I am no fan of Microsoft. I have, on occasion squealed with a certain amount of glee upon learning about their products being disabled by viruses. But it seems somewhat crass to celebrate the latest viral infection at the Redmond campus. It seems a Microsoft employee returned from overseas with a stowaway on board: measles. The hapless employee then wandered around Redmond for four days exposing others before the illness was diagnosed. The link does give us a unique glimpse into the feeding habits of the Microsoftee, BTW.
But another, more worrying pathogen is on my mind. Back in the 90's, I got a job working as a counselor for a Southwest Washington hospital-based drug and alcohol program. I had to have a TB test. It was positive. I spent a lot of time in hospitals on pulmonary wards so I guessed I had been exposed there, and the numerous courses of prednisone I had in the intervening might have broken down the protective calcifications that isolate the bacilli in the lungs -- so I seroconverted. My follow-up x-ray was negative, so that meant a year of pills. Being a stable, median income citizen, of course I took the drugs without fail and now get x-rays from time to time to be sure I don't get it again (I will always test positive).
We came very close to eradicating TB in the US. What happened? Ronald Reagan. The Johnson administration had put into place a well-organized program of public health nurses who tracked TB patients across the country. It was understood that, once treatment was started, the patient needed to complete the whole year, or drug resistant strains would develop. Thus, homeless patients were tracked across the country by these dedicated workers. TB rates began to decrease. The Reagan Administration saw this and decided that the program was too expensive for the number of patients it was serving. They didn't get that it was serving the entire population of the US by preventing drug resistant TB. And they didn't count on a brand new player -- something that was being called Gay Immunodifficiency Disease -- that would soon be called AIDS. Couple AIDS with TB and you get the pathogenic equivalent of nuclear winter.
WHO is declaring a regional emergency in Africa because of rampant TB. Since I tested positive in the 90's, the TB rate in Sub-Saharan Africa has quadrupled. Though they account for only 11% of the world's population, Africa accounts for 25% of the world's TB cases. It kills over 500,000 per year.
Suddenly, Washington, USA , doesn't even seem like it's on the same planet.
But another, more worrying pathogen is on my mind. Back in the 90's, I got a job working as a counselor for a Southwest Washington hospital-based drug and alcohol program. I had to have a TB test. It was positive. I spent a lot of time in hospitals on pulmonary wards so I guessed I had been exposed there, and the numerous courses of prednisone I had in the intervening might have broken down the protective calcifications that isolate the bacilli in the lungs -- so I seroconverted. My follow-up x-ray was negative, so that meant a year of pills. Being a stable, median income citizen, of course I took the drugs without fail and now get x-rays from time to time to be sure I don't get it again (I will always test positive).
We came very close to eradicating TB in the US. What happened? Ronald Reagan. The Johnson administration had put into place a well-organized program of public health nurses who tracked TB patients across the country. It was understood that, once treatment was started, the patient needed to complete the whole year, or drug resistant strains would develop. Thus, homeless patients were tracked across the country by these dedicated workers. TB rates began to decrease. The Reagan Administration saw this and decided that the program was too expensive for the number of patients it was serving. They didn't get that it was serving the entire population of the US by preventing drug resistant TB. And they didn't count on a brand new player -- something that was being called Gay Immunodifficiency Disease -- that would soon be called AIDS. Couple AIDS with TB and you get the pathogenic equivalent of nuclear winter.
WHO is declaring a regional emergency in Africa because of rampant TB. Since I tested positive in the 90's, the TB rate in Sub-Saharan Africa has quadrupled. Though they account for only 11% of the world's population, Africa accounts for 25% of the world's TB cases. It kills over 500,000 per year.
Suddenly, Washington, USA , doesn't even seem like it's on the same planet.
