Posted on 01/04/2013 12:28:01 AM PST by neverdem
The world is starting to win the war against tuberculosis, but drug-resistant forms pose a new threat.
If there was any doubt that tuberculosis (TB) was fighting back, it was dispelled in 2005, at the Church of Scotland Hospital in the village of Tugela Ferry, South Africa. Doctors at the hospital, in a rough, remote corner of KwaZulu-Natal province, were hardened to people dying from gunshots and AIDS. But even they were puzzled and frightened when patients with HIV who were responding well to antiretroviral drugs began dying — rapidly — from TB.
With ordinary TB, patients start to feel better after a few weeks or months on a selection of four mainstay antibiotics. But of the 542 people with TB at the hospital in 2005 and early 2006, 221 (41%) had a multi-drug-resistant (MDR) form, against which these therapies are mostly powerless. Worse, 53 of them did not even respond to the few antibiotics that form a second line of defence. Eventually, doctors had nothing left to try: all but one of the 53 died, half of them within 16 days of diagnosis. It was the first major outbreak of what became known as extensively drug-resistant (XDR) TB — and a wake-up call to the world that TB had taken a turn for the worse1.
In the early 1980s, TB cases had dropped to such low rates that Western policy-makers frequently talked of eradication of the disease. Then came...
--snip--
Worldwide, TB is now the leading cause of death among people with HIV.
The resurgence of ordinary TB set the stage for drug-resistant forms. Resistance develops when people do not stick to their drug regimens — which typically last six months for drug-sensitive TB and 20 months for MDR-TB — allowing naturally occurring resistant mutants to grow and evolve...
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
tb, malaria, cholera still kill millions, but we spend all the research money on combating aids
It’s difficult to get most people in the 3rd world in particular to stick to a drug regimen of even a few weeks. The compliance rate for 6 or 20 months’ therapy is probably in the low single digits. Not only that, a lot of the supply will end up being resold to people who don’t need it, don’t understand it, are not given proper instructions on how to use it and also will not comply even if they did.
Therefore it’s impossible to prevent these new mutant strains from developing while these “last resort” antibiotics are distributed to patients who are misusing them.
“Worldwide, TB is now the leading cause of death among people with HIV.”
Unfortunately, there are lots of drug resistant bugs winging their way into the US every day. Not to worry, tight immigration policies, strict border controls and incredibly cutting-edge ObamaCare technologies will slay the beast. Save us, Ms Sebelius.
Looks like the Democrats are about to lose a major part of their constituency.
Modern science can eradicate as many diseases as it wants.
The muslims will find some way to bring them back, spread them and improve them.
Like polio.
Obama's crowd have gutted the units in NIH that do epidemiological studies ~ and reduced their funding to almost nothing. This coming plague is going to be upon us before anyone knows it ~ and the death rate among the Obama voters should be mindboggling.
I think that could explain the Democrat loss of 4 to 6 million voters between 2008 and 2012 (accounting for both dead former voters and new registrants).
Several of their own voter registration protection projects reported that they found whole neighborhoods devoid of voters they knew had actually been there in prior years ~ which while praiseworthy does not address the obvious questions ~ were those merely fake voters used for vote fraud, or did they move away, or were they real voters who died at a very high rate.
The Democrat party's Axelrods probably want to know because this stuff is a gamechanger.
Remember, the acolytes of the Antichrist are not smarter than average, nor can they see any further into the future ~ maybe less actually, but they are a brutal bunch who will stoop to any level to murder the innocent. We already know who they are ~ they support the Free Fire School Zones law, abortion on demand, open borders, ....... ~ your basic Democrat party programs. They imagine plague is on their side.
>>Looks like the Democrats are about to lose a major part of their constituency.
There’s billions more available.
It's all the fault of those evil drug companies. They should forgo the profit motive in order to improve society.........then we could ALL live like the north Koreans.
They imagine plague is on their side.
***
Very insightful. Chilling.
We can thank gays and Africans for this scourge.
Both are like walking petri dishes mixing up pathogens to spread to the wider world.
A quarantine of these careless populations would have nipped this in the bud, but this was not politically correct, so we must all pay the price. They should have at least made it, “Miss your meds once, and you are in quarantine.”
We can thank gays, junkies and Africans for this scourge.
Both are like walking petri dishes mixing up pathogens to spread to the wider world.
A quarantine of these careless populations would have nipped this in the bud, but this was not politically correct, so we must all pay the price. They should have at least made it, “Miss your meds once, and you are in quarantine.”
There are Libertarians among us who advocate on behalf of the junkies ~ and so do George Sorros and his friends ~ they aid in the spread of deadly diseases.
But even they were puzzled and frightened when patients with HIV who were responding well to antiretroviral drugs began dying — rapidly — from TB.
____________________________
People with pooor immune function are dying of TB. No kidding. What is new?
Gays in general will be wiped out. Gay Hollywood and entertainment will be gone. Gay politicians will be gone. (There is one politician in particular that I suspect has HIV. If he has it, I hope he gets TBOS.) Gay marriage will be forgotten.
The elderly will be wiped out.
The ghettos will be essentially depopulated. The poor will otherwise suffer huge percentages of deaths because they live in congested areas and many of the poor already have bad health.
Children will be hit hard because they tend to be congregated in places like Government schools.
There will be so much overall loss of life that birth control pills and condoms will cease to be free for single females. Society will direct a volcanic wrath on them and tell them to find a man, marry him, stay at home, and produce many children. Single women will no longer be welcome in the work place, and society will be yelling at men and telling them to go back to work. Any single woman who has an abortion will be looked at like she has leprosy. Feminism will be gone.
The death rates differ by ethnicity ~ some groups are more readily wiped out than are others. I've never read much about age group differentials ~ although there is one for pneumonia ~ which might be what you are thinking about.
I suspect it will have an imprint rather like that of hanta virus. The young adults will die first simply because more of them are out socializing ~ at work, at play, and wherever. The very young, and the elderly will be hit less often. You'll end up with a civilization bracketed by the old and the young ~ and only those societies heavily mechanized, automated, computerized, roboticized and using the latest in modern work methods will survive as civilizations. The rest will collapse into the dustheaps of history ~ much as they did back in the mid 1400s to 1600s in the Americas.
Is there a vaccine for TB?
We’ve also stopped federal development of new antibiotics, putting more work into AIDS vaccines than antibiotics. And pharmaceutical companies, to my knowledge, haven’t announced many new antibiotics.
We would also see a scream to close the border. So many TB cases are illegal immigrants coming across the border to work, and they can spread the disease to the already ill in hospitals, the elderly in nursing homes and very young in childcare facilities. The parents of infected young children and parents will be less likely to use such facilities in the future, or to permit the hiring of illegal immigrants in the future.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.