Word: tb
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...after the threats of bioterrorism, and after the spread of HIV and SARS in recent decades, public health officials would be better prepared - and more coordinated - when it comes to dealing with nasty bugs that hitch rides from country to country in often unsuspecting plane travelers. But this latest TB scare illustrates that the system still has a long way to go to be able to deal effectively with such health crises...
...year old Andrew Speaker disobeyed CDC officials when they contacted him during his trip in Rome and asked that he remain in the city until special transport could be arranged. It was then that an official for the U.S. health agency informed him that his TB was not only resistant to multiple drugs, as he had initially been told before he left for Europe, but was also considered "extensively resistant" to drugs (XDR), meaning most first-line and second-line drug treatments might be ineffective...
Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) is the kind of germ that makes public-health officials go very pale when they talk about it. TB is bad enough, wasting bodies, ravaging lungs. The multi-- drug-resistant kind is worse. And XDR is the very rare but very awful strain that has all but exhausted the medical arsenal, leaving mainly faith and force as weapons: keep the patient isolated and hope that some treatment works against it, which happens in less than one-third of cases. The good news is that most people infected with the germ won't develop...
...government has claimed broad powers to isolate anyone who poses a public-health threat--including those who may have been exposed but aren't yet sick--to contain a flu pandemic or a bioterrorist attack. Various states are flexing their muscles; authorities in Arizona have locked up a TB patient because he refused to wear a mask when he went outside. In New York, patients who refuse to take their meds--an action that can promote drug-resistant strains of TB--can be confined. Such cases are a reminder that there are no antidotes yet for ignorance or indifference...
...Buffett has done with Bill and Melinda Gates. By standard principles of foundation management, a $3.5 trillion endowment would have a 5% payout of about $175 billion a year, an amount sufficient to extend basic health care to all in the poorest world; end massive pandemics of AIDS, TB and malaria; jump-start an African Green Revolution; end the digital divide; and address the crying need for safe drinking water for 1 billion people. In short, this billionaires' foundation would be enough to end extreme poverty itself. All in all, it's not a bad gig for men and women...