Topic: The coming TB epidemic

[Pandora]

I put this in general because I want y'all to see it .......

At the Chicago Boyz blog, Trent Talenko writes,  America’s Impending Tuberculosis Epidemic, which should scare the heck out of you, because it contains some serious epidemiological information.

    …this idea of TB positive illegal alien children released to illegal immigrant parents scares the heck out of me from the point of view of epidemiology. In the 1920’s TB was the eighth leading cause of death for children 1-to-4 years old. Since then American public health has been so effective in preventing it that the USA no longer has any “herd immunity” to TB.

    This “catch and release” illegal alien policy is horrible from the infectious disease point of view in that phlegm or aerosolized sputum that are contaminated withMycobacterium tuberculosis are active biohazards that have long latent infection periods. This makes “exposure” very easy. The clinical definition of TB Exposure — which I found in a University of Vanderbilt student medical file PDF — is the following:

    “A person is considered to be exposed if there is shared breathing space with someone with infectious pulmonary or laryngeal tuberculosis at a time when the infectious person is not wearing a mask and the other person is not wearing an N95 respirator. Usually a person has to be in close contact with someone with infectious tuberculosis for a long period of time to become infected; however, some people do become infected after short periods, especially if the contact is in a closed or poorly ventilated space.”

For example, riding on a bus or an airplane from the Texas border to, say, San Diego or Boston. Or warehousing children in close quarters on military bases. So, we get prolonged exposure in a poorly ventilated place, and then distribution across the United States. And expose our armed forces to potentially lethal and difficult-to-treat highly infectious diseases, Supidity would be the charitable explanation for such a policy.

After a detailed and alarming exploration of the problems involved with identifying and then treating TB spreading, Talenko offers the following warning signs to watch for:

    THINGS TO LOOK FOR
    Forewarned is forearmed, so here are a list of “The TB Epidemic is here markers” to put in your social media and RSS feeds in terms of near future events –

    • Mass orders of N95 masks by State, Federal or Military health systems.
    • Mass orders of BCG vaccine by State, Federal or Military health systems.
    • Shortages/price spike of the list of 10 standard TB antibiotics
    • “Cone of silence” media reporting of TB in public hospitals or school stories that exclude the mention of illegal alien TB sufferers.
    • Border Patrol Agent or health worker families becoming infected with TB from immigrant processing centers

Given the numbers of illegal immigrant children already released by the Obama Administration — and the further numbers it wants to release before President Obama leaves office — the only thing you can say for certain about the coming TB epidemic is that it is inevitable.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/07/are_you_ready_for_a_tb_epidemic.html

[Pandora]

From the Telenko (correct spelling) link:

TB SCREENING, LTBI AND VACCINATION
While active TB can be found by chest X-rays, screening for latent TB infection (LTBI) can only be found by two tests that screen blood and skin. The problem for screening these illegal alien immigrants is, strangely enough, that they are from countries with wide scale TB vaccinations.

The TB vaccine is called BCG (Bacille Calmette-Guérin). It is considered controversial because it isn’t “very effective” in countries with a low incidence of TB, like the USA. However, that isn’t the biggest reason BCG isn’t usually given in the United States. Mass inoculation with BCG would remove both latent TB skin tests from the public health arsenal and increase the false positive rates from blood tests because those treated with BCG vaccinations all have the anti-bodies that current skin and blood tests look for. The public health system would lose most of its ability to track the spread of latent TB in the American population. The current public health paradigm of track, isolate and treat TB is about to come to a horrible end for the American public health system.

... here are ten FDA approved antibiotic drugs for treatment of TB with a core of four drugs listed by the CDC as the “preferred treatment regimes” which lasts 6-to-9 months. Those core treatment regimen drugs include:

• isoniazid (INH)
• rifampin (RIF)
• ethambutol (EMB)
• pyrazinamide (PZA)

The reason for so many different drugs is that TB is developing resistance to antibiotic treatment.

... The six-to-nine month long TB antibiotic treatment regimes must be followed rigorously, and completed, or the LTBI and the active TB infected will breed more MDR and XDR TB strains.

So, the vaccine will probably save lives but render the skin test useless on the basis of false positives.

The reason the antibiotic treatment regime is often prematurely abandoned by the patient is because of frequent blood testing for liver function and because (from one commenter) it beats hell out of the liver -- sore and swollen.

People in towns and neighborhoods need to talk to the local government folks and discuss the possibility of implementing wide-scale vaccination programs, false positives be damned.

There will be talk of hysteria, over-reaction, tin-foil hats and such, but I can't help remembering (for anyone else who read it) The Last Centurion and what happened when country-wide vaccine programs were properly implemented, and what happened when they weren't.  Yeah, it's fiction.  So?

[Libertas]

Jeez...and I work in feral-central...   

I might have to split!  Alive and poor beats dead and whatever...

I should ask our pointy-headed poohbahs what their plan is to protect employees and other patients from this, as I am sure it is a matter of when and not if this crap invades our spaces!  But seeing as how they are true-believer kool-aid guzzling libiots, I am not hopefull of a honest or complete answer...

I'll let y'all know what they say...