Still, I'm confident that most of us who look at the following picture would want to drive a fist into his grinning mug.
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| Science & Technology |
| XDR-TB Is Lethal And Fast |
| 2007-05-31 |
| "It was the height of summer in February 2005 and the hospital was filled with patients with both TB and HIV/AIDS," recalled Dr. Tony Moll, the anti-retroviral program manager at the Church of Scotland Hospital in Tugela Ferry. "I remember there were two patients who just weren't getting better. I don't know why, but I had this terrible feeling that something really sinister was happening," Moll said. In most instances, HIV/AIDS positive patients being treated with both anti-retrovirals and tuberculosis drugs improved, Dr. Moll explained, but not these two. "They were getting worse by the hour." With a lack of testing facilities in his rural hospital in South Africa's Kwazulu-Natal province, Dr. Moll asked for special permission to have the sputum samples of 45 patients sent to Durban and tested for resistance to TB drugs. Nurses collected samples from the two very ill patients, as well as 43 others being treated with TB and anti-retroviral drugs, and sent them off. By the time the results came back eight weeks later, 10 of the patients were dead, including the two who had been very ill. Of the 45 samples, 10 were resistant to all six TB drugs they tested for. "I got a cold shiver, with such fear in my heart," Moll said. "I thought, 'This is airborne. Could I be infected? Could my staff be infected?' To go into a new realm of XDR-TB, which is basically untreatable, was almost unthinkable," he said, using the acronym for Extremely Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis. Moll's worst fears eventually were realized: Four of the hospital nurses died in those first few months. From that point on, the hospital began identifying more and more patients -- and in almost all cases, the patients with XDR-TB were dead before the lab results were back. Most die within 16 days of being identified as a possible XDR-TB case. The mortality rate of XDR-TB is 84 percent. Since the first two cases, close to three years ago, doctors at the Church of Scotland Hospital have identified 266 people with XDR-TB. That is just one small hospital. Across South Africa, doctors in all nine provinces have reported XDR-TB cases. "It seems to be simmering, with increasing numbers each month," says Moll said. "It's not explosive, but it's slow, insidious, increasing numbers." With recent U.S. fears of tuberculosis being stoked by a Georgia man's trans-Atlantic travels while infected with XDR-TB, South Africa's struggles serve as an ominous reminder of how deadly the disease can be. The South African government has installed extractor fans in all TB wards and hospital staff use surgical face masks, but doctors claim there is a lack of good isolation facilities available. It has been reported that small rural clinics and hospitals can sometimes wait for up to three weeks with an XDR-TB patient in a general ward before a bed is available in one of the few urban hospitals better equipped to deal with the disease. Experts claim a drug to deal specifically with XDR-TB is more than a decade away, so doctors use a combination of six to eight TB drugs to treat it. Currently, a small group of XDR patients have been treated for more than five months in a Durban hospital, but their results have fallen short of doctors' expectations. "Ultimately we need prevention, as the current treatment regime just isn't the way to go," Moll said. "The bulk of the patients just die so quickly." |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #9 How comforting that border guys feel they know more than the intel given them about said travelers. The unidentified inspector explained that he was no doctor but that the infected man seemed perfectly healthy and that he thought the warning was merely "discretionary," officials briefed on the case told The Associated Press. link So he knew he was sick and should have been detained but allowed him free entry?! What a stupid a**. And yes let me straighten his tie it's not tight enough. |
| Posted by: Jan 2007-05-31 21:30 |
| #8 And it's sinse by a full two lengths with a rare quadruple post! Still, I'm confident that most of us who look at the following picture would want to drive a fist into his grinning mug. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-05-31 21:17 |
| #7 Years ago, I was in restaurant in Belfast, incidentally I'm pretty sure it was the Abercorn which got blown up a short while later, and the Irish girl with me told me that man with the soft persistent cough at the next table had TB. "That cough, you can hardly hear. That's why the Irish call it the polite disease." |
| Posted by: phil_b 2007-05-31 21:04 |
| #6 what's bad is that it took a dumbass too fly over much of the western hemispehere for anyone too realize it |
| Posted by: sinse 2007-05-31 20:46 |
| #5 what's bad is that it took a dumbass too fly over much of the western hemispehere for anyone too realize it |
| Posted by: sinse 2007-05-31 20:46 |
| #4 what's bad is that it took a dumbass too fly over much of the western hemispehere for anyone too realize it |
| Posted by: sinse 2007-05-31 20:45 |
| #3 what's bad is that it took a dumbass too fly over much of the western hemispehere for anyone too realize it |
| Posted by: sinse 2007-05-31 20:45 |
| #2 what's bad is that it took a dumbass too fly over much of the western hemispehere fo anyone too realize it |
| Posted by: sinse 2007-05-31 20:45 |
| #1 84% mortality in 16 days? Jeesh! Ebola virus has 90% mortality. Even smallpox had only 30% mortality during its heyday. XDR-TB is up there with the biggies. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2007-05-31 19:36 |