Posted on 12/27/2009 4:11:24 PM PST by jessduntno
LANTANA, Fla. (Dec. 27) - It started with a cough, an autumn hack that refused to go away.
Then came the fevers. They bathed and chilled the skinny frame of Oswaldo Juarez, a 19-year-old Peruvian visiting to study English. His lungs clattered, his chest tightened and he ached with every gasp. During a wheezing fit at 4 a.m., Juarez felt a warm knot rise from his throat. He ran to the bathroom sink and spewed a mouthful of blood.
I'm dying, he told himself, "because when you cough blood, it's something really bad."
It was really bad, and not just for him.
Doctors say Juarez's incessant hack was a sign of what they have both dreaded and expected for years - this country's first case of a contagious, aggressive, especially drug-resistant form of tuberculosis. The Associated Press learned of his case, which until now has not been made public, as part of a six-month look at the soaring global challenge of drug resistance.
Juarez's strain - so-called extremely drug-resistant (XXDR) TB - has never before been seen in the U.S., according to Dr. David Ashkin, one of the nation's leading experts on tuberculosis. XXDR tuberculosis is so rare that only a handful of other people in the world are thought to have had it.
"He is really the future," Ashkin said. "This is the new class that people are not really talking too much about. These are the ones we really fear because I'm not sure how we treat them."
(Excerpt) Read more at sphere.com ...
Hey, I have an idea. Let’s open the borders and relax our immigration standards.
Obama’s Fault
“Hey, I have an idea. Let’s open the borders and relax our immigration standards.”
That should help .. then the plague can kill off the TB patients ...
Happy to read this as I sit here coughing from who knows what.
Oh, Goody! Another ‘epidemic’ for the Government to panic us about...then screw up!
Hmmmmmmmmmmm...any Gubmint experts out there know what this overlap means?
Yet another crisis that only massive new government spending and bureaucracies can solve for us. Or at least pretend to solve.
I read somewhere that officials have been worried about stuff like this getting into the prison system. In very short order there won't be a problem with overcrowding.
I really need to get the hell out of NY.
send us your tired, your poor and your disease ridden
Must be a crisis in the orval office so a new worry is launched to take our mind off the incompetence of Homeland inSecurity.
Now we return you to the golf game in Hawaii...
Just think, a perfect illustration as to how “Our Diversity Is Our Strength!” This report sends a “tingle” up my leg.
Hey, just in time to take care of all the new AIDS immigrants who have the green light to come in now. With their weakened immune systems, they will be able to spread both diseases, not just one.
Treat it like they did the AIDS/HIV disease, let em come on in, spend billions seeking a cure, we don’t need the stinking money for other things anyway.
Pretty soon we will be able to re-introduce the colorful phrase "uh-oh a lunger" back into common usage ... and Doc Holiday will once again be a more appreciated character ... and we can be thrilled that the children will be able to see an example of authentic frontier hawking up of a lung ...
Nigerians lighting themselves on fire on US airliners. Peruvians coming to the US with incurable TB. How about a little Homeland Security here? You guys can’t control our borders but you think you can control the world’s climate.
Enough! My father died of the disease when I was very young.
I knew it before I even opened the thread.
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