Posted on 04/02/2007 2:02:57 PM PDT by 3AngelaD
PHOENIX — Behind the county hospital's tall cinderblock walls, a 27-year-old tuberculosis patient sits in a jail cell equipped with a ventilation system that keeps germs from escaping.
Robert Daniels has been locked up indefinitely, perhaps for the rest of his life, since last July. But he has not been charged with a crime. Instead, he suffers from an extensively drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis, or XDR-TB. It is considered virtually untreatable.
County health authorities obtained a court order to lock him up as a danger to the public because he failed to take precautions to avoid infecting others. Specifically, he said he did not heed doctors' instructions to wear a mask in public...
Though Daniels' confinement is extremely rare, health experts say it is a situation that U.S. public health officials may have to confront more and more because of the spread of drug-resistant TB and the emergence of diseases such as SARS and avian flu in this increasingly interconnected world...
In the United States, which had a total of 13,767 reported cases of tuberculosis in 2006, public health authorities only rarely have put TB patients under lock and key...New York City forced TB patients into detention following an outbreak in the 1990s, and saw a significant dip in cases.
Daniels lived in Russia for 15 years and returned to the United States last year after he was diagnosed. He said he thought he would get better treatment here, and hoped eventually to bring his wife and children from Russia. He said he briefly worked in an office in Arizona for a chemical company before he was put away.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
That's not jail, that's called 'Quarantine'. An outbreak of a highly resistant strain of TB could kill hundreds in a damn gruesome way.
Would he infect as many people with deadly TB as a person with AIDS who dosen´t care if he/she transmits their deceases.
I don't write the headlines, I just copy them exactly as they are published because I don't want the FR Double Post Police to come get me and attack my motives and my honor.
But his "Lobby" isn't nearly as good.
Yes, as TB can be spread through proximity activity and not need to have a bodily fluid exchange like AIDS.
If he were to go to the mall and hang out in the food court, or travel on a plane, he could infect scores of people in a short period of time.
Wearing a mask would lower the risk to a minimal level, but he refused to do so, so it is quarantine for him.
Here’s to HIV, the only pathogen with human rights!
If he was homosexual, he would be a free man.
From what I understand, an HIV-positive male could expose dozens in a single evening down at the bathhouse.
I wouldn't want to be within a mile of him even if he were wearing a mask. They should have quarantined those with AIDS 25 years ago as well.
My old house in Kansas used to be a sanitarium with hinged quarantine doors and stuff, pretty cool old house from about 1900.
Anyways I believe the guy refused treatment and so the health department had to step in and quarantine him.
Yes, but he can’t expose you to a deadly disease by sneezing on you.
With AIDS, you have to make a choice to expose yourself to the disease, with TB you don’t have the choice.
You should save that comment for the various school districts here in Houston who will not report illegal students that have been diagnosed with TB. I personally know of two incidents where this occurred, and these kids were exposed in classrooms full of other kids until CDC stepped in. All the kids and teachers presumably exposed went and got tested - on their own dime mind you.
TB is a horror disease. It can attack almost any organ in the body, can debilitate you terribly or leave you looking nearly normal. It can drive you insane, or make you brilliantly creative or hypersexual. It can kill quickly or take years to destroy you.
What we think of as “Gothic”, was to a large extent influenced by the dread fear of Tuberculosis.
Best book I ever read about it was “The Plague and I,” by Betty MacDonald.
TB is much easier to spread than HIV. You can catch it by just being in the same room as an infected person. I was exposed to TB by an inmate I was guarding at the hospital. I sat ten feet away from him for eight hours unaware that he had TB. In fact I was never told that he had TB because it would have been a violation of his privacy rights. I finally realized something was wrong when I went in the next day and I had to sit in the hallway because he was quarantined. Three months later I took my annual TB test and tested positive for TB. My doctor sent me for a chest X-ray,which came back negative but I was put on a medication for six months that causes liver damage. TB is so dangerous because it can infect you and you might never know when or where you got it. I’ll always test positive for TB but I was lucky to only be exposed to the disease.
True, but the, ummmm, 'shaft' can kill ya'...
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