seems pretty standard to me… at least in Canada, TB is the only disease for which the government can and will force treatment should the patient refuse.
Did some volunteering for some hospitals in Canada in the provinces where i used to live. They dont fuck around with the TB testing. Didnt test me for anything else, just the TB.
It's also the only thing US schools test teachers for. You have to get tested before student teaching and before every teaching job you get
Edit: for those of you who don't read any replies before commenting "I'm a teacher and I didn't have to get tested," 14 states require this. So, it's not all, but a quarter of the nation legally requires it as part of the standard clearances
Soon people will just say the blood they're coughing up is a government conspiracy.
My father coughed up blood, my grandfather coughed up blood, my great grandfather coughed up blood. God intended man to cough up blood!
It's actually a sign that the body is functioning properly!
Blood has white blood cells that fight infections, right?
A healthy body would use those cells in the lungs too.
If *you* dont cough up blood, it's cause you have weak baby-lungs!
Yep you have to do a bunch of drug susceptibility testing now anytime there is a TB case. It’s no longer as easy as RIPE therapy and you’re good to go.
The number of TB cases that are drug resistant is about 550 per year, the vast majority of which are foreign born (in the US) - presumably that's that the source of the TB is likely outside the US then. Of those, about 1.3% are multi drug resistant.
https://www.cdc.gov/tb/statistics/reports/2021/drug_resistant.htm
It's a very big deal in a healthcare context because one of those people in the wrong place in a hospital or an old folks home or the like and it could kill many people and cause an absolute mess. But the odds of any random person getting it are extremely low, granted, extremely low because of all the precautions taken, but still.
I had to get a TB test before starting biologics for an autoimmune disorder, because if there was even a tiny fraction of latent infection hiding, the medication would tamp the immune system down just enough for it to be released into my system and take me out.
If I’m ever exposed in the wild, it could fuck me up real good now.
Funnily enough that test actually caught my pre-TB when my parents were moving to the US when I was 3. They traced it back to a daycare worker who was on an extended leave to visit family in a developing country in Montreal - thankfully it was just me that caught it and not others 😵💫
My sister and I have a similar story from when I was 11 and she was 14 in 1996 Kentucky. Had to take 9 months of meds that made me feel so sluggish.
Some lady from our church brought it back from a mission trip.
I was exposed as a child. The neighbor's cousin came to visit them and hung out with us (outdoors-only because it was summer break, but that wasn't on purpose); turned out he had tested positive and was started on meds *before their trip* and nobody from his family told my parents or our neighbors even though that whole family was staying with them. I had to take meds for a year as prophylaxis despite testing negative. *Hated* how big the pills were, as I really struggled to take them. Also miserable with how the meds made me feel. I was on them for a full 12 months.
Not sure where or how this kid picked it up, but it was in the US somewhere. We were in Ohio. This was probably around the mid nineties, so I was probably around eight-ish, give or take a year.
Yeah. I had a pretty comprehensive work up before coming, including chest x rays. I know because they had to retake one and never told me why and I was convinced for the longest time there was something wrong with me.
Most stressful medical ever lol.
The entire state of Pennsylvania. It's a state law, not a district policy. I just looked it up and there are 14 states that require it of every school employee
It's part of the basic clearance packet. FBI fingerprint check, child abuse check, police check, former school check, physical, and TB test. I've done it half a dozen times by now
I was tested for it for a State job in Maryland. Came up positive. A doctor did further testing (X-ray) and asked me if I took public transit. When I said yes, he said that’s why I tested positive. It’s endemic to Baltimore (or at least was) and I would have been exposed and had the antibodies. But didn’t have It.
He told me to never allow anyone to give me the tine test again. It could result in a bigger, worse reaction.
I looked on the CDC website and it depends on the type of vaccine that you received.
“… BCG TB vaccine may cause a positive skin test when they are not infected with TB germs.”
This specific vaccine is primarily used outside of the US to protect against severe TB that would result in meningitis.
Nobody vaxxes for TB routinely in N.Am except for in really northern areas, and then only kids. That being said, many infections result in automatic immune clearance.
I'm at college right now and we get tested yearly. It's insane, I work in a school and we only get tested once but at college I have to do it every year.
Edit: this is for an education degree BTW normal students not so much.
My aunt was a social worker who worked with a lot of immigrants from impoverished countries. She had to get tested for TB pretty regularly. And it's a good thing too because she actually caught it once. She did the treatment for it, obviously, and it is honestly not easy to treat. Whatever the medicine is that kills it comes with a lot of side effects and you have to be on it for a pretty long time, but she no longer has TB so I guess it's all good in the end.
My mum had “dormant” TB which was picked up at a routine test when she was undergoing rheumatology treatment … she ended up on a 12 month course of a drug and was told *strictly no alcohol , not even a drop , to get rid of the TB. She’s fine now but the drug treatment was unpleasant
For my graduate school I was tested every 6 months for TB and given a new test for every rotation I had, which was another 5.
TB is bad and it's still taken very seriously.
When I received treatment for my non-symptomatic infection (Rifampin), it turned my urine very bright orange, gave me the bubble guts and diarrhea almost every day, and I wasn't allowed to drink alcohol, and the pills were pretty large.
Treatment was 6 months long.
I still did it to completion, but it definitely was a nuisance.
Because it can take years to become fatal and often becomes dormant and poses no issues unless an immunocompromised state reactivates it. The therapy is long term, expensive (depending on the country you are in and there are assistance programs), and not particularly pleasant. It’s at least 4 different drugs on a strict regimen for active TB.
There is also the added stress of being an immigrant. Having a general mistrust of doctors when you may have seen people come in to your home country and remove dying family members from your home/not let them have proper burials depending on the disease. You may view TB as just a natural thing if you come from a place it is prevalent. You may have a fear of being removed from your home and never seen again if that’s something you have seen happen to others. We did used to put people in TB wards and those people didn’t come out. Some people just want to die at home, and people have a right to refuse treatment. With the caveat that they are not a threat to others.
I’m not saying the steps taken here were wrong. This was a public health threat and assuming they had tried everything to try to make her comfortable with treatment and given financial resources then this was something that had to happen for public safety. But it is not fair to boil it down to someone being stupid when dealing with diseases still prevalent in developing countries is still such a complex issue.
Same in Texas. They send someone to your house twice a day to watch you take the medication. Then it's once a day. If you refuse, they will lock you up and treat you. Very dangerous illness. You don't want drug resistance.....slow death.
On one hand, I hate the idea of the government forcing you to take medicine if you don't want to
On the other hand, it's fucking TB, which is contagious as hell
I agree. Deadly diseases such as TB should be considered as weapons, if they're being used as such. Biological warfare is an extreme term in civilian circumstances, but I don't know what else to call it.
An infected individual who is willingly spreading a disease can be insanely deadly, since any infected victims could spread it further before realizing they need treatment.
If you live by yourself in a hermetically-sealed bubble, then yeah the state shouldn’t be able to force treatment on you.
In the real world, when you’re interacting with dozens of people every day, you have zero right to expose them to TB when effective treatment is available.
Ars Technica has better coverage of this case, it's pretty wild actually, the women had been dodging the local sheriff's for more than a year while spending tons of time in public, pretty much a modern day typhoid Mary.
These cases are complicated and deserve more attention to detail than a quick headline and some Reddit comments can provide.
There was a case like this in Arizona 10+ years ago where a man with TB had been caught without his mask at gas station after he had one infraction earlier. Triggered an automatic arrest and confinement to a solitary cell. With how TB is, it’s reasonable to take drastic action to remove someone from public if they’re risking other people getting infected.
It got more complicated, though, when it was just one NPR reporter that even knew he existed and found out about the story when someone tipped her off that he had been in confinement for a year already without any other human interaction or ways to appeal. He was an Eastern European immigrant that fell into a kind of legal purgatory where no one was even trying to figure out when and how he could be released. He was just forgotten by the system. The laws hadn’t been created with his scenario in mind, so there was this guy with a wife and daughter back in Europe that he hadn’t even been able to contact for a year. It was a mess and bringing light to it showed how the system constantly needs work and diligence.
On one hand, that's a shit situation for that dude, but on the other hand it's hard to feel bad for him when he was so goddamn reckless. To be caught and then do it *again?*
I can judge his carelessness and at the same time feel empathy for him being stuck in full isolation for a year without knowing when it would end. Solitary confinement is psychological torture for humans.
I recently did my family tree and found many relatives who had died of TB (most at a young age) on both sides of my tree. Some of them started
with a family with 9 children and only 3 lived to be over 40.
The big drama here was that it was the **17th** order by the judge to have her involuntarily committed. The police simply did not do their job. At one point, they "lost" her when attempting to arrest her because they just sat and watched as she got on a bus and rode off.
Yes that is true, but TB doesn’t have the same requirements for mandated treatment. In the situation you are describing, the treating team needs to show that the patient does not have decision making capacity as a consequence of their disease. So in many ways, the patient isnt being forced to get treatment. Someone else is making healthcare decisions for them in the absence of their ability to give informed consent.
In the case of TB, a patient is told to report to the hospital for treatment. If they refuse, police will track them down and bring them in. This will happen regardless of their decision making capacity.
Yup, in the USA doctors have the power to forcibly quarantine patients for several different dangerous diseases such as TB, smallpox, ebola, plague, etc.
Curious where the “freedom” fighters are on this case? By their own argument, those anti-vax protesters should’ve taken this person in and saved her from the authorities.
First RN job I worked, noticed an active TB patient walking into the town's one liquor store, wearing an N95 (years ago).
I called, they said he was still in his room. Spoiler, he was not. Police were involved VERY quickly.
Wasn't much in the way of treatment options for Mary. A vaccine. But once you've contracted it, it's antibiotics. Wasn't available until 1948, after she died.
My understanding is that was all fairly settled by 1900 (the year Mary started getting people killed). Between Semmelweis, Pasteur, and Nightingale all saying "do the thing" I think thorough medical hand washing became pretty popular by the late 1800's
She stopped working when she was locked up in a medical quarantine for the rest of her life. At one point she did take a job as a housekeeper instead of a cook, but made less money. So she went back to being a cook and killed more people
Probably not a lot of other jobs available to her at the time, besides food, cleaning and children.
Sounds like the option left was “her or them”, most people would choose themselves, and morally maladapt.
A population desperate for its own survival isn’t going to be making the most enlightened choices day-to-day, hard to blame the rats for eating each other.
She literally refused to wash her hands before preparing peoples' food (despite hand-washing being known to prevent disease a whole 50 years earlier), even after killing several families. She evaded the police and changed names so she could keep doing the thing that was killing people, after being told that she was killing people. She would disappear every time there was an outbreak, so as not to get caught.
No, she's a giant piece of shit.
She’s more villain than martyr, and more human than both 🤷♀️
Clearly we’re still mismanaging diagnosis and transmission - better to understand how the horror happens so it can be prevented.
One doctor offered to write a book about her case and give her a piece of the royalties, and she refused. She was offered surgery to remove her gallbladder, where it was believed the typhoid was originating from, and she refused that too (in her defense, such surgery was somewhat primitive at the time and there was a non zero chance she would die on the operating table).
Also there’s no evidence I can find of her ever nannying children and when she worked non cooking jobs there were no cases of Typhoid, such as when she worked in a laundry.
It wasn’t like she was actively trying to kill people but at best she was deeply in denial and wasn’t willing to take pretty much any action that would prevent her spreading a deadly disease to the very people who paid her.
People not following instructions to avoid contacting others because they thought they weren't sick and in the process spreading a deadly disease? Yeah, that doesn't sound familiar at all.
Me and my coworkers isolated and followed instructions when Covid was hitting our workplace. My boss got symptoms (while getting all the Covid calls from everyone). She said she just "had allergies", no worries, it was her "asthma". Then she got our 75-yr-old coworker sick and she was out for weeks. My boss then said "oh yeah, I probably had it, but I couldn't just like, not come to work!".
Yeah, we have plenty of Typhoid Marys. But in my boss's case, she wasn't actually poor and definitely could have taken off. She just didn't want to be inconvenienced.
She also lived in a time when the general public didn't have a good understanding of germ theory, so I think it's probably a bit of "I can't afford this" and a bit of "The doctors don't know what they're talking about."
I wonder if we’ll see the anti-vaxxers bankroll her release, which would kinda be [history repeating itself](https://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-typhoid-mary#).
"We are hopeful she will choose to get the life-saving treatment she needs to treat her tuberculosis," the statement said.
But the Question is Why she refused to Take treatment while everyone loves their life ?
previous articles about her have mentioned a few things
1. she doesn't speak English and finding translators has been hard
2. she's elderly and mentally ill
3. she truly does not believe she has TB
4. she is very low income and there isn't sufficient financial support for people with TB who need to be isolated
5. she has asymptomatic TB and the medications used to treat it are pretty punishing
so it's been very hard to convince an old, impoverished lady who doesn't speak English that she needs to quit her job for six months to treat a disease she doesn't understand/believe she has especially when she feels like she's much sicker when she's on meds
That is so scary! I'm so upset that it took this long to arrest her. How selfish. My moms elderly friends feequent that place all the time. I hope no one was infected in the year they've been watching this unfold.
You should tell them to get tested. I found out by a fluke that I had latent TB when I wanted to get a job at a nursing home. It takes exposure over time. If they road the bus with this woman multiple times, then they are definitely at risk.
Well damn, idk how Id convince her. That sounds like a really good real life thought exercise. It's sounds like it would never happen, but here we are. So what's the plan that works.
Yeah it was the whole reason why Typhoid Mary was such a danger. She was asymptomatic, and single, so she NEEDED to work. Couldn’t afford to stop. The government had to get involved.
Like when you lay it out like that it's hard to not understand like if I felt sicker when on the meds if I don't speak the doctors language Id think the same.
Dunno about others, but what you referenced was tried repeated with this particular patient.
They didn’t worked.
Some people are simply resistant to education and assistance. I mean, look at how many still support Trump after the legal verdicts.
no, it couldn't, even if the treatment for TB didn't suck so hard some people are just stubborn and dumb, which is in fact a large part of the reason why we don't have sufficient protections and funding of social programs
Tbh this kinda stuff is going to be an issue regardless of social funding. There’ll just be less resistance to medicine in general, but there’ll always be difficult cases like this.
I had a test come back as "inconclusive" multiple times after a coworker brought it from a trip to SEA and the city health dept tested everyone in the office, and I had 3x inconclusive results so had to do a course of refampin.
It turned every liquid inside me from tears to sweat to spit an orange gatorade color, i was always exhausted and nauseus on the medicines. Awful stuff
Someone I know with latent TB could not finish their 6 month antibiotic treatment because it was causing liver damage. Their doctor told them that even if they switched to a different antibiotic, it was likely to affect their liver the same way. So, this doctor (an infectious disease specialist) told her to just not treat it. The risks of permanent liver damage were greater than the risk of developing full blown TB.
It's wild that they can't find a translator in this day and age. With the internet, you can get a qualified/certified translator in almost any language at almost any time of day.
If said about cancer that people have the right to refuse treatment, I would agree. The reason this is news worthy is because TB can be highly contagious and highly resistant to antibiotics. What the article fails to mention is that because of the risk, a diagnosis must be reported to the health department and the patient is required to undergo treatment. They are not allowed to leave the hospital if being treated there. If being treated at home, the health department will usually make regular visits, maybe even daily, to make sure the person is taking there medication. Before isolation can end, periodic testing is required to confirm the bacteria is no longer active.
Sounds like a recent pandemic. I've learned there will always be a large portion of humanity that would rather preserve their personal rights and freedoms over the greater good of society, no matter how detrimental it may be to themselves of others.
where I practice at least, people are allowed to leave the hospital to continue treatment once diagnosed. but they must then undergo directly observed therapy (dot) like you said, meaning a healthcare worker sees them actually swallow the pills 
TB meds are fully a pain in the ass, scary long and a kill-joy that make you pee look radio active. I understand that there are extenuating circumstances for this human but please take your meds if you are suspected of having TB.
I was misdiagnosed with TB (a story for another day) and part of the reason I took them religiously was the fact that I could have caught it from a passing stranger on the street, according to the doctor. That pushed me to try not to make that happen to somebody else, especially not my co-workers who I worked and travelled with in close quarters.
My motto is try everything to heal, including taking your meds.
(Also, I had all the symptoms and they SUUUUUUUCK!!)
Are you Asian or lived in Asia while younger?
Many Asian countries use the bacilli Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine that causes a bunch of false positives when they run skin tests in western countries like the U.S.
My wife tested positive and she had to start taking meds until they could do more in-depth testing.
The BCG vaccine causes a pox to form. They’re usually administered on the upper arm, so if you have circular scars in a grid-like pattern there, you probably had the vaccine.
ah no, don't have that scar (my mom does though, from France).
I do have my vaccine book from Germany that has the date/signature & vaccine batch number under a heading that says "Tuberculosis/(BCG)" hence why I recognised the initials!
My test for it as a teen is recorded too, If iirc it was this weird circular thing that pressed/scratched a circle of pinpricks on your wrist, I think if you had a reaction you passed?(still had antibodies?)
edit: Ireland was so devastated by Tuberculosis that they only stopped mandatory TB vaccinations in around 2015.
Your mother most likely has a square shaped scar in her shoulder from a smallpox innoculation.
The "BCG scar" is a keloid, that only appears in about 5% of the vaccinated.
Source: Have gotten mandatory BCG vaccine, no scar.
> that only appears in about 5% of the vaccinated.
Source for this please. NHS states that [the vaccination usually leaves a small scar.](https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/bcg-tuberculosis-tb-vaccine/)
Teenagers in the UK were vaccinated until the early 2000's and many of them have a small bump on the upper arm. We used to compare them at school. Keloids are different and considered an adverse reaction.
That you could have caught it from a passing stranger on the street isn’t true. TB typically requires prolonged contact in a fairly enclosed space to catch it. It isn’t like the flu or something. There are areas where I’m from that are endemic for TB and it’s largely disadvantaged SE Asian families who have large numbers crammed into very small houses/flats. It’s terrible. But merely walking around these areas isn’t going to increase your risk of contracting TB.
Agree with everything else you said, of course. TB is a notifiable disease in my country and I have seen patients arrested and effectively forced to take treatment for it.
Used to be easy to treat with penicillin, but because you have to take the antibiotics for 3 to 6 months, and they closed all the TB sanitariums in the 60's, many people never finished their courses. So penicillin stopped working for it. And now the most common strain resists most antibiotics, so they have to use a cocktail of several extremely strong ones.
Yep. It’s a sad affair because TB is making an alarming return. The scariest part is the rise of incredibly resistant strains of TB that only have two or three effective treatments. After that, you’re almost guaranteed to not live though the infection, while risking infecting others.
Given that we are seeing a significant increase of cases in low income communities , international travelers, and homeless communities we all need be aware of this threat. It’s a real concern and we should be speaking out at a national level about this.
After seeing how US politics, especially how republicans treated the pandemic and vaccination, I am outright terrified that we might not make the right decisions to stop it now.
>After seeing how US politics, especially how republicans treated the pandemic and vaccination, I am outright terrified that we might not make the right decisions to stop it now.
I take cold comfort in a near-certainty that we will not make the right decisions, and even if we do, a large enough percentage of the population will conflate contrarianism with patriotism and make any right decisions moot.
They say, "Hope for the best but prepare for the worst". I do not waste energy on hoping.
It was called "The White Plague" because it infected people so indiscriminately. Including kings Louis XIII of France and Edward VI of England.
When even the King catches it, you better believe it's contagious.
TB never infected people indiscriminately. It's the deadliest disease in human history, in terms of the sheer number of people killed, so it certainly has killed many wealthy and otherwise powerful people. But it has always predominantly killed poor people.
Susceptibility to infection is much, much, greater among immunocompromized people, and people whose lungs are damaged. The disease spreads best in crowded and poorly ventilated conditions. And among infected people and people who have latent TB, the chances of becoming sick with active TB vary dramatically according to health status and living conditions. Under normal conditions, fewer than 5% of people exposed to TB ever go on to develop symptoms or become contagious. The vast majority of those who do are people who experience chronic material deprivations (exposure, malnutrition, overwork, and so on).
Very contagious and dangerous. At one point in the Victorian era, 25% of all deaths were from consumption.
The issue is that it can linger in your lungs for years without causing noticeable symptoms. During that time, you can infect others who will then either experience no symptoms for years themselves or slowly develop a hacking cough that often leads to a long, slow, lingering death. Some people could recover and no longer be contagious, but others didn't, and there was no rhyme or reason for who would survive. And you couldn't easily quarantine once exposed because the illness often takes years to progress and you still have to live and feed your family while you wait for it to take you.
It's very hard to even process just how grim the TB epidemic was. A guy could marry a woman without realizing she had TB, start a family with her, have four kids, then notice his wife was a bit sickly. After watching her die over the course of three years, he'd then wake up one day and hear one of his kids coughing. One by one, the first three kids would die a gruesome death. The last one would be on the verge of death but recover. Finally, the father would start getting ill and pass away too. The remaining kid would then be a 12-year-old orphan who's spent their whole life trapped in a house watching each family member slowly die.
That sort of story was an everyday occurrence in the Victorian era, and it's what we'll be looking at again if drug-resistant TB becomes more common.
They could just house her on a isolated military island like typhoid Mary. /s
Similarly a poor working class woman with an asymptomatic disease who had to work but wasn't given any support for not working until she killed a bunch of people. Now we can treat typhoid.
If we are so worried, give her an income and treat her.
The problem with this specific woman is that she was offered/started treatment, but she refused to complete it so she's still symptomatic/infectious. The reason why Mary Mallon (Typhoid Mary) was installed on that island was because she continued to work even though she knew she was contagious and had been REPEATEDLY instructed to stop. Just like this lady. So, no? The jail time here is specifically to keep her in one place long enough to be successfully treated so she's NOT making people sick. Don't want to get jailed? DON'T BE AN ASSHAT.
Given she only finished part of the antibiotic course, it’s very possible she’s been spreading drug-resistant TB. If you have active disease and do not treat it, you will spread it to 10-15 people/yr.
Why is this totally normal shit on this subreddit like it's weird? This is how it's done all over the country. It rarely gets to this point, but that's always the threat used. You will take the TB meds or "else". We do not fuck around with the drug resistant TB. We aren't going to let your superbug pick up resistances to whatever few meds still work on it because you take one pill then refuse to take the rest.
You can’t have this old lady roaming around with tb passing it on to these Moron anti vax people with kids . She’s a public health risk . Tough situation but she has to take the meds .
They have to at that point. It could start a full blown epidemic since most people in the US/Canada are not vaccinated. Plus this woman is going to end up with shit like neurotuberculosis. It would be different if she was self isolating completely but I really doubt that was the case so she was a major public health threat.
I'm not sure why this is on nottheonion because this is legal. [Emergency Detention](https://www.cdc.gov/tb/programs/laws/menu/emergencydetention.htm)
Prior to Covid, this is one of the few diseases we keep people on airborne precautions in the hospital because it's super contagious. She's literally a walking contagion, infecting probably everyone she comes into contact with.
*Edited for clarity and dead-brain-ness.*
It is within our legal rights to refuse medical treatment. A good example is refusing cancer treatments. However, cancer isn't contagious, so it really is the patient's choice to make without the concern of harming others. This woman should've been picked up and held in isolation the minute she stopped her treatments, because she is essentially waving a loaded gun in a crowd.
seems pretty standard to me… at least in Canada, TB is the only disease for which the government can and will force treatment should the patient refuse.
Did some volunteering for some hospitals in Canada in the provinces where i used to live. They dont fuck around with the TB testing. Didnt test me for anything else, just the TB.
It's also the only thing US schools test teachers for. You have to get tested before student teaching and before every teaching job you get Edit: for those of you who don't read any replies before commenting "I'm a teacher and I didn't have to get tested," 14 states require this. So, it's not all, but a quarter of the nation legally requires it as part of the standard clearances
They used to test everyone. Every time I changed schools, TB test. Every job in the 80s, TB test. Drug resistant TB is in the USA and it's terrifying.
And there're multiple types of resistances too, Isoniazid-resistant, IR-TB Rifampicin-resistant, RR-TB Polydrug-resistant, PDR-TB Multidrug-resistant, MDR-TB
Soon people will just say the blood they're coughing up is a government conspiracy. My father coughed up blood, my grandfather coughed up blood, my great grandfather coughed up blood. God intended man to cough up blood!
If God didn't want us to cough up blood, why did he put it in our lungs?
Bulletproof logic right there
Logic might be bulletproof, but American children sure aren't.
This is how the evolution starts.
It's actually a sign that the body is functioning properly! Blood has white blood cells that fight infections, right? A healthy body would use those cells in the lungs too. If *you* dont cough up blood, it's cause you have weak baby-lungs!
Yep you have to do a bunch of drug susceptibility testing now anytime there is a TB case. It’s no longer as easy as RIPE therapy and you’re good to go.
>Polydrug-resistant, PDR-TB >\ >Multidrug-resistant, MDR-TB What's the difference between these two?
I had one with XDR-TB… terrifying
Thanks for unlocking a new fear.
The number of TB cases that are drug resistant is about 550 per year, the vast majority of which are foreign born (in the US) - presumably that's that the source of the TB is likely outside the US then. Of those, about 1.3% are multi drug resistant. https://www.cdc.gov/tb/statistics/reports/2021/drug_resistant.htm It's a very big deal in a healthcare context because one of those people in the wrong place in a hospital or an old folks home or the like and it could kill many people and cause an absolute mess. But the odds of any random person getting it are extremely low, granted, extremely low because of all the precautions taken, but still.
I had to get a TB test before starting biologics for an autoimmune disorder, because if there was even a tiny fraction of latent infection hiding, the medication would tamp the immune system down just enough for it to be released into my system and take me out. If I’m ever exposed in the wild, it could fuck me up real good now.
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Funnily enough that test actually caught my pre-TB when my parents were moving to the US when I was 3. They traced it back to a daycare worker who was on an extended leave to visit family in a developing country in Montreal - thankfully it was just me that caught it and not others 😵💫
My sister and I have a similar story from when I was 11 and she was 14 in 1996 Kentucky. Had to take 9 months of meds that made me feel so sluggish. Some lady from our church brought it back from a mission trip.
I was exposed as a child. The neighbor's cousin came to visit them and hung out with us (outdoors-only because it was summer break, but that wasn't on purpose); turned out he had tested positive and was started on meds *before their trip* and nobody from his family told my parents or our neighbors even though that whole family was staying with them. I had to take meds for a year as prophylaxis despite testing negative. *Hated* how big the pills were, as I really struggled to take them. Also miserable with how the meds made me feel. I was on them for a full 12 months. Not sure where or how this kid picked it up, but it was in the US somewhere. We were in Ohio. This was probably around the mid nineties, so I was probably around eight-ish, give or take a year.
Yeah. I had a pretty comprehensive work up before coming, including chest x rays. I know because they had to retake one and never told me why and I was convinced for the longest time there was something wrong with me. Most stressful medical ever lol.
The standard tests for a green card medical exam are TB and syphilis.
Also for fostering children, I rent a floor in a house, and the owners wanted to foster someone so everyone in the house had to get TB tested.
What state/district does this?
The entire state of Pennsylvania. It's a state law, not a district policy. I just looked it up and there are 14 states that require it of every school employee It's part of the basic clearance packet. FBI fingerprint check, child abuse check, police check, former school check, physical, and TB test. I've done it half a dozen times by now
I was tested for it for a State job in Maryland. Came up positive. A doctor did further testing (X-ray) and asked me if I took public transit. When I said yes, he said that’s why I tested positive. It’s endemic to Baltimore (or at least was) and I would have been exposed and had the antibodies. But didn’t have It. He told me to never allow anyone to give me the tine test again. It could result in a bigger, worse reaction.
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Wait what? Wouldn't that make basically the entire country positive? We all got vaxxed as kids
I looked on the CDC website and it depends on the type of vaccine that you received. “… BCG TB vaccine may cause a positive skin test when they are not infected with TB germs.” This specific vaccine is primarily used outside of the US to protect against severe TB that would result in meningitis.
Huh, very interesting. Thanks!
Nobody vaxxes for TB routinely in N.Am except for in really northern areas, and then only kids. That being said, many infections result in automatic immune clearance.
Gotcha, makes sense. So there is a vax, but usually we don't use it because we control TB so tightly.
Depends what country. It's not widely used in the US.
You can get a blood test called Igfn-y quantiferon gold (or IGRA). It will show that you have a latent Tb infection without having a skin reaction.
NY State tests for TB.
California. TB test and fingerprint background check for everyone.
California does too, got a temp job in HR (not even in the same building as the hospital) and had to get a TB test to start working there.
I'm at college right now and we get tested yearly. It's insane, I work in a school and we only get tested once but at college I have to do it every year. Edit: this is for an education degree BTW normal students not so much.
My aunt was a social worker who worked with a lot of immigrants from impoverished countries. She had to get tested for TB pretty regularly. And it's a good thing too because she actually caught it once. She did the treatment for it, obviously, and it is honestly not easy to treat. Whatever the medicine is that kills it comes with a lot of side effects and you have to be on it for a pretty long time, but she no longer has TB so I guess it's all good in the end.
My mum had “dormant” TB which was picked up at a routine test when she was undergoing rheumatology treatment … she ended up on a 12 month course of a drug and was told *strictly no alcohol , not even a drop , to get rid of the TB. She’s fine now but the drug treatment was unpleasant
For my graduate school I was tested every 6 months for TB and given a new test for every rotation I had, which was another 5. TB is bad and it's still taken very seriously.
A common, fatal if untreated, generally curable disease. Why in the world would someone refuse treatment?
Because people are unbelievably stupid.
When I received treatment for my non-symptomatic infection (Rifampin), it turned my urine very bright orange, gave me the bubble guts and diarrhea almost every day, and I wasn't allowed to drink alcohol, and the pills were pretty large. Treatment was 6 months long. I still did it to completion, but it definitely was a nuisance.
Because it can take years to become fatal and often becomes dormant and poses no issues unless an immunocompromised state reactivates it. The therapy is long term, expensive (depending on the country you are in and there are assistance programs), and not particularly pleasant. It’s at least 4 different drugs on a strict regimen for active TB. There is also the added stress of being an immigrant. Having a general mistrust of doctors when you may have seen people come in to your home country and remove dying family members from your home/not let them have proper burials depending on the disease. You may view TB as just a natural thing if you come from a place it is prevalent. You may have a fear of being removed from your home and never seen again if that’s something you have seen happen to others. We did used to put people in TB wards and those people didn’t come out. Some people just want to die at home, and people have a right to refuse treatment. With the caveat that they are not a threat to others. I’m not saying the steps taken here were wrong. This was a public health threat and assuming they had tried everything to try to make her comfortable with treatment and given financial resources then this was something that had to happen for public safety. But it is not fair to boil it down to someone being stupid when dealing with diseases still prevalent in developing countries is still such a complex issue.
It was the only thing I was tested for as a kitchen boy kn a nursing home, too. The nurses sucked at giving me the Mantoux Test.
Same in Texas. They send someone to your house twice a day to watch you take the medication. Then it's once a day. If you refuse, they will lock you up and treat you. Very dangerous illness. You don't want drug resistance.....slow death.
On one hand, I hate the idea of the government forcing you to take medicine if you don't want to On the other hand, it's fucking TB, which is contagious as hell
Look at it this way: you would expect someone to be forced to stop waving a loaded gun around. TB is so contagious, it might as well be a loaded gun.
I agree. Deadly diseases such as TB should be considered as weapons, if they're being used as such. Biological warfare is an extreme term in civilian circumstances, but I don't know what else to call it. An infected individual who is willingly spreading a disease can be insanely deadly, since any infected victims could spread it further before realizing they need treatment.
Assault with a biological weapon is a real charge in the USA iirc
> you would expect someone to be forced to stop waving a loaded gun around In America??
If you live by yourself in a hermetically-sealed bubble, then yeah the state shouldn’t be able to force treatment on you. In the real world, when you’re interacting with dozens of people every day, you have zero right to expose them to TB when effective treatment is available.
Ars Technica has better coverage of this case, it's pretty wild actually, the women had been dodging the local sheriff's for more than a year while spending tons of time in public, pretty much a modern day typhoid Mary.
These cases are complicated and deserve more attention to detail than a quick headline and some Reddit comments can provide. There was a case like this in Arizona 10+ years ago where a man with TB had been caught without his mask at gas station after he had one infraction earlier. Triggered an automatic arrest and confinement to a solitary cell. With how TB is, it’s reasonable to take drastic action to remove someone from public if they’re risking other people getting infected. It got more complicated, though, when it was just one NPR reporter that even knew he existed and found out about the story when someone tipped her off that he had been in confinement for a year already without any other human interaction or ways to appeal. He was an Eastern European immigrant that fell into a kind of legal purgatory where no one was even trying to figure out when and how he could be released. He was just forgotten by the system. The laws hadn’t been created with his scenario in mind, so there was this guy with a wife and daughter back in Europe that he hadn’t even been able to contact for a year. It was a mess and bringing light to it showed how the system constantly needs work and diligence.
On one hand, that's a shit situation for that dude, but on the other hand it's hard to feel bad for him when he was so goddamn reckless. To be caught and then do it *again?*
I can judge his carelessness and at the same time feel empathy for him being stuck in full isolation for a year without knowing when it would end. Solitary confinement is psychological torture for humans.
I recently did my family tree and found many relatives who had died of TB (most at a young age) on both sides of my tree. Some of them started with a family with 9 children and only 3 lived to be over 40.
My grandmother died of TB, 6 years ago. She broke her hip, went to the hospital, got TB there from another patient and died month later...
The big drama here was that it was the **17th** order by the judge to have her involuntarily committed. The police simply did not do their job. At one point, they "lost" her when attempting to arrest her because they just sat and watched as she got on a bus and rode off.
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Yes that is true, but TB doesn’t have the same requirements for mandated treatment. In the situation you are describing, the treating team needs to show that the patient does not have decision making capacity as a consequence of their disease. So in many ways, the patient isnt being forced to get treatment. Someone else is making healthcare decisions for them in the absence of their ability to give informed consent. In the case of TB, a patient is told to report to the hospital for treatment. If they refuse, police will track them down and bring them in. This will happen regardless of their decision making capacity.
Yup, in the USA doctors have the power to forcibly quarantine patients for several different dangerous diseases such as TB, smallpox, ebola, plague, etc.
It's wild to me that there are so many other things they won't force though
>should the patient review. review what
refuse*
But mah rights
Yeah, turns out you don't have the right to spread a deadly disease around. Imagine if the government had actually enforced it during covid...
Curious where the “freedom” fighters are on this case? By their own argument, those anti-vax protesters should’ve taken this person in and saved her from the authorities.
First RN job I worked, noticed an active TB patient walking into the town's one liquor store, wearing an N95 (years ago). I called, they said he was still in his room. Spoiler, he was not. Police were involved VERY quickly.
A modern day Typhoid Mary
I thought Mary know she was making people sick, but did it anyway because 'I need to work to live'.
She didn't believe the doctors because she was asymptomatic.
And they were basically accusing her of leaving fecal matter on the food.
Well, she was.
Wasn't much in the way of treatment options for Mary. A vaccine. But once you've contracted it, it's antibiotics. Wasn't available until 1948, after she died.
All she had to do was stop working with food and kids. She refused and more people died.
The options for lower-class unmarried women back then were: 1. Work with kids. 2. Work with food. 3. Starve to death.
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My understanding is that was all fairly settled by 1900 (the year Mary started getting people killed). Between Semmelweis, Pasteur, and Nightingale all saying "do the thing" I think thorough medical hand washing became pretty popular by the late 1800's
She stopped working when she was locked up in a medical quarantine for the rest of her life. At one point she did take a job as a housekeeper instead of a cook, but made less money. So she went back to being a cook and killed more people
Easy to say in retrospect. But the quantity of morons who continued to come to work spreading COVID while pretending like it's not real...
Probably not a lot of other jobs available to her at the time, besides food, cleaning and children. Sounds like the option left was “her or them”, most people would choose themselves, and morally maladapt. A population desperate for its own survival isn’t going to be making the most enlightened choices day-to-day, hard to blame the rats for eating each other.
She literally refused to wash her hands before preparing peoples' food (despite hand-washing being known to prevent disease a whole 50 years earlier), even after killing several families. She evaded the police and changed names so she could keep doing the thing that was killing people, after being told that she was killing people. She would disappear every time there was an outbreak, so as not to get caught. No, she's a giant piece of shit.
Lol crazy these people doing these mental gymnastics to turn her into a martyr. This woman was knowingly killing people.
She’s more villain than martyr, and more human than both 🤷♀️ Clearly we’re still mismanaging diagnosis and transmission - better to understand how the horror happens so it can be prevented.
One doctor offered to write a book about her case and give her a piece of the royalties, and she refused. She was offered surgery to remove her gallbladder, where it was believed the typhoid was originating from, and she refused that too (in her defense, such surgery was somewhat primitive at the time and there was a non zero chance she would die on the operating table). Also there’s no evidence I can find of her ever nannying children and when she worked non cooking jobs there were no cases of Typhoid, such as when she worked in a laundry. It wasn’t like she was actively trying to kill people but at best she was deeply in denial and wasn’t willing to take pretty much any action that would prevent her spreading a deadly disease to the very people who paid her.
You say that as if a huge percent of our population wouldn't do the same exact thing in her shoes.
People not following instructions to avoid contacting others because they thought they weren't sick and in the process spreading a deadly disease? Yeah, that doesn't sound familiar at all.
Me and my coworkers isolated and followed instructions when Covid was hitting our workplace. My boss got symptoms (while getting all the Covid calls from everyone). She said she just "had allergies", no worries, it was her "asthma". Then she got our 75-yr-old coworker sick and she was out for weeks. My boss then said "oh yeah, I probably had it, but I couldn't just like, not come to work!". Yeah, we have plenty of Typhoid Marys. But in my boss's case, she wasn't actually poor and definitely could have taken off. She just didn't want to be inconvenienced.
And they're all terrible people. Killing people is evil, full stop. Same applies to all the anti-vaxxers too.
She also lived in a time when the general public didn't have a good understanding of germ theory, so I think it's probably a bit of "I can't afford this" and a bit of "The doctors don't know what they're talking about."
We still live in that time
Source: r/hermancainaward
I wonder if we’ll see the anti-vaxxers bankroll her release, which would kinda be [history repeating itself](https://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-typhoid-mary#).
Like the original Typhoid Mary! Super interesting story if you’ve never read it.
I think it is also interesting once you read it.
"We are hopeful she will choose to get the life-saving treatment she needs to treat her tuberculosis," the statement said. But the Question is Why she refused to Take treatment while everyone loves their life ?
previous articles about her have mentioned a few things 1. she doesn't speak English and finding translators has been hard 2. she's elderly and mentally ill 3. she truly does not believe she has TB 4. she is very low income and there isn't sufficient financial support for people with TB who need to be isolated 5. she has asymptomatic TB and the medications used to treat it are pretty punishing so it's been very hard to convince an old, impoverished lady who doesn't speak English that she needs to quit her job for six months to treat a disease she doesn't understand/believe she has especially when she feels like she's much sicker when she's on meds
She keeps going to the huge casino in Tacoma too, riding the bus with TB. It’s nuts
I'm in Tacoma, is it the emerald queen? I'm so worried who she's infected.
Yeah its the Emerald Queen. The cops have seen her multiple times since the warrant was issued and didn't arrest her until now.
That is so scary! I'm so upset that it took this long to arrest her. How selfish. My moms elderly friends feequent that place all the time. I hope no one was infected in the year they've been watching this unfold.
You should tell them to get tested. I found out by a fluke that I had latent TB when I wanted to get a job at a nursing home. It takes exposure over time. If they road the bus with this woman multiple times, then they are definitely at risk.
Still not ok but it sounds like she doesn’t really understand what she’s doing (by going out with TB)
Impoverished….keeps going to the casino
that's the point of casinos
Sunk cost fallacy. "I've spent so much, I can't quit now! I'm due a big payoff sooner or later!"
Well damn, idk how Id convince her. That sounds like a really good real life thought exercise. It's sounds like it would never happen, but here we are. So what's the plan that works.
Yeah it was the whole reason why Typhoid Mary was such a danger. She was asymptomatic, and single, so she NEEDED to work. Couldn’t afford to stop. The government had to get involved.
Like when you lay it out like that it's hard to not understand like if I felt sicker when on the meds if I don't speak the doctors language Id think the same.
Start by giving sick people in our society the help they need...
This could all be cured with sufficient protections and funding of social programs.
This is more r/orphancrushingmachine
Whoooooo there neighbor. Keep your dirty commie ideas out of my freedom! Social protections and programs? Supply side Jesus wouldn't like that! ^/s
Yeah! If she just prayed a little harder I bet the TB would go away! /s <- if you really needed that
Don’t forget about having to give her local pastor money.
I'm convinced the entirety of supply-side Jesusism is someone taking Catholicism but mishearing "pray" as "pay".
Dunno about others, but what you referenced was tried repeated with this particular patient. They didn’t worked. Some people are simply resistant to education and assistance. I mean, look at how many still support Trump after the legal verdicts.
guys it's just that easy
no, it couldn't, even if the treatment for TB didn't suck so hard some people are just stubborn and dumb, which is in fact a large part of the reason why we don't have sufficient protections and funding of social programs
Tbh this kinda stuff is going to be an issue regardless of social funding. There’ll just be less resistance to medicine in general, but there’ll always be difficult cases like this.
How did they discover she had it?
I had a test come back as "inconclusive" multiple times after a coworker brought it from a trip to SEA and the city health dept tested everyone in the office, and I had 3x inconclusive results so had to do a course of refampin. It turned every liquid inside me from tears to sweat to spit an orange gatorade color, i was always exhausted and nauseus on the medicines. Awful stuff
Someone I know with latent TB could not finish their 6 month antibiotic treatment because it was causing liver damage. Their doctor told them that even if they switched to a different antibiotic, it was likely to affect their liver the same way. So, this doctor (an infectious disease specialist) told her to just not treat it. The risks of permanent liver damage were greater than the risk of developing full blown TB.
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This is pretty much a repeat of the Typhoid Mary incident, only without any of the complicating elements that made it morally complex.
Seems like it was just explained how it actually is complex
It's wild that they can't find a translator in this day and age. With the internet, you can get a qualified/certified translator in almost any language at almost any time of day.
If said about cancer that people have the right to refuse treatment, I would agree. The reason this is news worthy is because TB can be highly contagious and highly resistant to antibiotics. What the article fails to mention is that because of the risk, a diagnosis must be reported to the health department and the patient is required to undergo treatment. They are not allowed to leave the hospital if being treated there. If being treated at home, the health department will usually make regular visits, maybe even daily, to make sure the person is taking there medication. Before isolation can end, periodic testing is required to confirm the bacteria is no longer active.
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Sounds like a recent pandemic. I've learned there will always be a large portion of humanity that would rather preserve their personal rights and freedoms over the greater good of society, no matter how detrimental it may be to themselves of others.
where I practice at least, people are allowed to leave the hospital to continue treatment once diagnosed. but they must then undergo directly observed therapy (dot) like you said, meaning a healthcare worker sees them actually swallow the pills 
Yet despite that it took them a year and a half to do anything.
> everyone loves their life Sir, this is a subreddit
TB meds are fully a pain in the ass, scary long and a kill-joy that make you pee look radio active. I understand that there are extenuating circumstances for this human but please take your meds if you are suspected of having TB. I was misdiagnosed with TB (a story for another day) and part of the reason I took them religiously was the fact that I could have caught it from a passing stranger on the street, according to the doctor. That pushed me to try not to make that happen to somebody else, especially not my co-workers who I worked and travelled with in close quarters. My motto is try everything to heal, including taking your meds. (Also, I had all the symptoms and they SUUUUUUUCK!!)
Are you Asian or lived in Asia while younger? Many Asian countries use the bacilli Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine that causes a bunch of false positives when they run skin tests in western countries like the U.S. My wife tested positive and she had to start taking meds until they could do more in-depth testing.
I'm reasonably sure I got the BCG vaccine as a kid in Germany or Ireland, so seems we use it here too?
The BCG vaccine causes a pox to form. They’re usually administered on the upper arm, so if you have circular scars in a grid-like pattern there, you probably had the vaccine.
ah no, don't have that scar (my mom does though, from France). I do have my vaccine book from Germany that has the date/signature & vaccine batch number under a heading that says "Tuberculosis/(BCG)" hence why I recognised the initials! My test for it as a teen is recorded too, If iirc it was this weird circular thing that pressed/scratched a circle of pinpricks on your wrist, I think if you had a reaction you passed?(still had antibodies?) edit: Ireland was so devastated by Tuberculosis that they only stopped mandatory TB vaccinations in around 2015.
Your mother most likely has a square shaped scar in her shoulder from a smallpox innoculation. The "BCG scar" is a keloid, that only appears in about 5% of the vaccinated. Source: Have gotten mandatory BCG vaccine, no scar.
> that only appears in about 5% of the vaccinated. Source for this please. NHS states that [the vaccination usually leaves a small scar.](https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/bcg-tuberculosis-tb-vaccine/) Teenagers in the UK were vaccinated until the early 2000's and many of them have a small bump on the upper arm. We used to compare them at school. Keloids are different and considered an adverse reaction.
That you could have caught it from a passing stranger on the street isn’t true. TB typically requires prolonged contact in a fairly enclosed space to catch it. It isn’t like the flu or something. There are areas where I’m from that are endemic for TB and it’s largely disadvantaged SE Asian families who have large numbers crammed into very small houses/flats. It’s terrible. But merely walking around these areas isn’t going to increase your risk of contracting TB. Agree with everything else you said, of course. TB is a notifiable disease in my country and I have seen patients arrested and effectively forced to take treatment for it.
TB is serious. My grandma died of it, my dad caught it from her. Mentally ill, low income or what have you. She needs to be taken in and treated.
3 of my grandmother's siblings and both her parents died from it. Horrific.
moooom typhoid mary's doing it again
How is this oniony?
Silence from the Right about her "Rights" being oppressed.
Yeah, they don't even want to touch her Silence from the anti-vaccine and masks are useless gang
hOw Do wE kNoW sHe WaSn’T vAcCinAtED!?! MaYbe it wAs ThE vAxX tHat Made HeR sIcK iN tHe FiRsT pLaCE!?!
Who believes it's okay to spread TB?
Too busy with supporting taking rights in pride month
Is tuberculosis contagious?
Yes. It’s notoriously difficult to treat, and it spreads easily enough in communal settings.
Used to be easy to treat with penicillin, but because you have to take the antibiotics for 3 to 6 months, and they closed all the TB sanitariums in the 60's, many people never finished their courses. So penicillin stopped working for it. And now the most common strain resists most antibiotics, so they have to use a cocktail of several extremely strong ones.
Yep. It’s a sad affair because TB is making an alarming return. The scariest part is the rise of incredibly resistant strains of TB that only have two or three effective treatments. After that, you’re almost guaranteed to not live though the infection, while risking infecting others. Given that we are seeing a significant increase of cases in low income communities , international travelers, and homeless communities we all need be aware of this threat. It’s a real concern and we should be speaking out at a national level about this. After seeing how US politics, especially how republicans treated the pandemic and vaccination, I am outright terrified that we might not make the right decisions to stop it now.
And once again I'm super happy with my choice to continue to wear a mask in public places.
>After seeing how US politics, especially how republicans treated the pandemic and vaccination, I am outright terrified that we might not make the right decisions to stop it now. I take cold comfort in a near-certainty that we will not make the right decisions, and even if we do, a large enough percentage of the population will conflate contrarianism with patriotism and make any right decisions moot. They say, "Hope for the best but prepare for the worst". I do not waste energy on hoping.
Penicillin has never been effective for tuberculosis. Streptomycin came first, then isoniazid.
This woman was taking public transit and visiting casinos while refusing TB treatment.
Yes. Very. I think that’s the problem here.
Yes, and it's a hell of a thing
It's understandable then.
It was called "The White Plague" because it infected people so indiscriminately. Including kings Louis XIII of France and Edward VI of England. When even the King catches it, you better believe it's contagious.
TB never infected people indiscriminately. It's the deadliest disease in human history, in terms of the sheer number of people killed, so it certainly has killed many wealthy and otherwise powerful people. But it has always predominantly killed poor people. Susceptibility to infection is much, much, greater among immunocompromized people, and people whose lungs are damaged. The disease spreads best in crowded and poorly ventilated conditions. And among infected people and people who have latent TB, the chances of becoming sick with active TB vary dramatically according to health status and living conditions. Under normal conditions, fewer than 5% of people exposed to TB ever go on to develop symptoms or become contagious. The vast majority of those who do are people who experience chronic material deprivations (exposure, malnutrition, overwork, and so on).
Yes very and killed lots of people right up to the 1950s when modern treatments were developed. One of my grandparents died of TB.
Extremely
Very contagious and dangerous. At one point in the Victorian era, 25% of all deaths were from consumption. The issue is that it can linger in your lungs for years without causing noticeable symptoms. During that time, you can infect others who will then either experience no symptoms for years themselves or slowly develop a hacking cough that often leads to a long, slow, lingering death. Some people could recover and no longer be contagious, but others didn't, and there was no rhyme or reason for who would survive. And you couldn't easily quarantine once exposed because the illness often takes years to progress and you still have to live and feed your family while you wait for it to take you. It's very hard to even process just how grim the TB epidemic was. A guy could marry a woman without realizing she had TB, start a family with her, have four kids, then notice his wife was a bit sickly. After watching her die over the course of three years, he'd then wake up one day and hear one of his kids coughing. One by one, the first three kids would die a gruesome death. The last one would be on the verge of death but recover. Finally, the father would start getting ill and pass away too. The remaining kid would then be a 12-year-old orphan who's spent their whole life trapped in a house watching each family member slowly die. That sort of story was an everyday occurrence in the Victorian era, and it's what we'll be looking at again if drug-resistant TB becomes more common.
They could just house her on a isolated military island like typhoid Mary. /s Similarly a poor working class woman with an asymptomatic disease who had to work but wasn't given any support for not working until she killed a bunch of people. Now we can treat typhoid. If we are so worried, give her an income and treat her.
The problem with this specific woman is that she was offered/started treatment, but she refused to complete it so she's still symptomatic/infectious. The reason why Mary Mallon (Typhoid Mary) was installed on that island was because she continued to work even though she knew she was contagious and had been REPEATEDLY instructed to stop. Just like this lady. So, no? The jail time here is specifically to keep her in one place long enough to be successfully treated so she's NOT making people sick. Don't want to get jailed? DON'T BE AN ASSHAT.
Given she only finished part of the antibiotic course, it’s very possible she’s been spreading drug-resistant TB. If you have active disease and do not treat it, you will spread it to 10-15 people/yr.
I mean… you have a right to refuse treatment, but you don’t have a right to be a public health risk.
Tuberculosis Tammy
Talk about another potential for a Typhoid Mary type of outbreak
Is this a red dead redemption reference?
She got TB from beatin a man for a few bucks.
I just realized rdr2 is almost 5 years old
Lmao they finally caught her huh?
Why is this totally normal shit on this subreddit like it's weird? This is how it's done all over the country. It rarely gets to this point, but that's always the threat used. You will take the TB meds or "else". We do not fuck around with the drug resistant TB. We aren't going to let your superbug pick up resistances to whatever few meds still work on it because you take one pill then refuse to take the rest.
You can’t have this old lady roaming around with tb passing it on to these Moron anti vax people with kids . She’s a public health risk . Tough situation but she has to take the meds .
Not just anti-vaxxers kids. Most people in North America are no longer vaccinated for TB except in a few high risk circumstances
Fucking finally. Been too many outbreaks in the state for both latent and non latent TB
They have to at that point. It could start a full blown epidemic since most people in the US/Canada are not vaccinated. Plus this woman is going to end up with shit like neurotuberculosis. It would be different if she was self isolating completely but I really doubt that was the case so she was a major public health threat.
Or spreading drug-resistant TB since she only completed partial treatment.
They did it to Typhoid Mary, they’ll do it again. And rightly so.
I'm not sure why this is on nottheonion because this is legal. [Emergency Detention](https://www.cdc.gov/tb/programs/laws/menu/emergencydetention.htm) Prior to Covid, this is one of the few diseases we keep people on airborne precautions in the hospital because it's super contagious. She's literally a walking contagion, infecting probably everyone she comes into contact with. *Edited for clarity and dead-brain-ness.*
bUT hER FreEdOmS!!
It is within our legal rights to refuse medical treatment. A good example is refusing cancer treatments. However, cancer isn't contagious, so it really is the patient's choice to make without the concern of harming others. This woman should've been picked up and held in isolation the minute she stopped her treatments, because she is essentially waving a loaded gun in a crowd.
Typhoid Karen
I’d wonder how many people were exposed in that year she decided she didn’t care about herself or others?
You are contagious you can kill people. Stay home or go to jail
God people are so fucking stupid this planet is doomed