(the oral history is obviously a bit sketchy, but she used to tell me her father also caught TB - cholera maybe ? - when he was removing bodies from the flooded Balham tube station in 1940 - https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/75th-anniversary-of-the...)
Well, I got quite the scolding about missing my jabs and a stern lecture about how many awful diseases have been cured because of vaccination. I could never forget how emotional she was about it.
To people born in the early 20th century, seeing the effects first hand of the vaccination programmes of the mid 20th century (not to mention antibiotics) must have seemed miraculous. I think we’ve lived without these diseases for so long that some people (stupid, selfish people) simply think they don’t exist or pose a threat any more.
This is true beyond just vaccines. All too often hardships are forgotten, history is just old pictures and stories, and people who are too far disconnected from those real events and don't learn from history will just walk the same path, leading to the same hardships.
They all think that the world is better today so they're smarter or better than the old generations, that the world evolved so they're intrinsically prepared, so the pains of the past can't harm them. Ironically they're ignoring all the lessons and the tools that made the world better and are needed to keep it like that, and instead think things are better because they just are.
They'll skip any vaccines or support extremist regimes because they think the modern world is just immune to this, it's intrinsically and permanently "fixed". We have freedoms or don't get sick because we "just" have freedoms and don't get sick.
Having close family spending a lifetime paralyzed by the polio virus before a vaccine was widely available, or spending some of my life in the cold embrace of dictatorship really drove the point home for me about learning the lessons of history.
The safety record of the BCG vaccine, in terms of permanent harm, is pretty good. But a normal side effect is "The usual expected reaction to BCG vaccination is redness and/or a small lump at the injection site, followed by a small ulcer (open sore) a few weeks later (usually less than 1 cm in diameter). The ulcer may last from a few weeks to months before healing to a small flat scar."[2] Mass vaccination will have parents screaming "my perfect baby has an open sore from the vaccine" on Instagram, with pictures.
The classic live-virus smallpox vaccine has similar side effects, by the way, plus a death rate of 1-2 per million.
Huge political problem. Remember all the screaming about the COVID vaccines, which are pure RNA, can't replicate, and have fewer side effects.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3349743/#s6
[2] https://www.rch.org.au/uploadedFiles/Main/Content/immunisati...
I got it when I was a toddler in the late 80s and I still remember the excruciating pain and have the scar to show for it.
I grew up in the third world. I have never met a Westerner with this scar unless they got it in the sixties.
There's an old Dutch fort in Ghana with a graveyard. Prior to modern medicine white people dropped like flies in Africa.
"Recorded history" has a very specific definition that places it in contrast with "prehistory": it's the time period in which we have written records of any sort, as opposed to the time period in which there is no surviving writing. That both phrases have "record" in them doesn't make them synonymous.
What’s a heinous tragedy in one could be an existential threat in the other.
Edit: actually let's put the 1950s up there instead. I think there's more information that way.
Additionally, from the article:
> the CDC started monitoring TB in the US in the 1950s.
When we say "recorded history" we don't mean "the window of time in which we have detailed records up to our modern standards", we specifically mean "the window of time in which we have records of any sort", contrasted with "prehistory".
The phrase they were looking for is "largest on record" or even better "largest since 195X".
> For broader world history, recorded history begins with the accounts of the ancient world around the 4th millennium BCE, and it coincides with the invention of writing.
EDIT: Downvote away, but I'd be interested to hear from someone who believes that "recorded history" is not incorrect and confusing usage here, with an explanation rather than a drive by vote.
An tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas has become the largest in recorded history in the US....the CDC started monitoring TB in the US in the 1950s.
"This is mainly due to the rapid number of cases in the short amount of time. There are a few other states that currently have large outbreaks that are also ongoing."
People with an active infection feel sick and can spread it to others, while people with a latent infection don't feel sick and can't spread it. It is treatable with antibiotics.
State public health officials say there is "very low risk to the general public."This is going to be a crazy four years, if it’s only four.
I'm surprised people put up with it when there's a vaccine.
Poor countries and communities cannot afford the options on the market. TB wont be solved until we put people before profit.
It would be useful and highly informative to be able to visit a single page to see daily/quarterly/bi-annual/annual diffs of which efforts habe received signoff.
[0] https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2023/09/05/...
Appears that it originated within a family group involving 6 kids and 7 adults.
But unfortunately the current administration has decided an ideological purification is more important than keeping the American public apprised of threats to their health.
So it wasn't published last week, and probably won't be this week either. "Politics don't matter" though ;) Bummer!
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Is there any reason why Kansas would be different than other states in particular?
Treating it casually has led to widespread resistance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidrug-resistant_tuberculos...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensively_drug-resistant_tub...
> People with an active infection feel sick and can spread it to others, while people with a latent infection don't feel sick and can't spread it.
https://www.who.int/teams/global-tuberculosis-programme/tb-r...
"Analysis of data from 14 countries in Africa and Asia suggests that about two thirds of global TB transmission may be from asymptomatic TB (95% prediction interval: 27–92%)."
I have long suspected this as part of why the subject isn't much discussed, despite being more prevalent than most realize.
The elephant here is (aside from latent infection) the atypically long duration of treatment, which can exceed 6 months and is harsh. Many, even otherwise responsible people, will founder before the proper end of treatment and this, I think, is what terrifies health professionals - so much, that it almost seems to be avoided.
It's probably time we start looking a bit harder for "natural" or alternate treatments. Some in medical journals, are under scrutiny, but inconclusive.
Edit: I also think we'll be finding more about latent infections being involved in an array of other ailments, especially when mixed with the ultra prevalent EBV. And EBV is involved in a lot.
You have to be a little suspicious of some of this — folks are looking for political reasons for scary disease outbreaks.
If the ideology was what you're saying, then wouldn't they want to spread the info and blame it on the "dirty illegals" or whatever?
pretty sure the ideology is to remove every social safety net and service to "prove" government doesn't work and then the robber barons can swoop in and make it a paid service... and make it so the capital class gets to make and save more money as they can afford to buy any of those services that were cut. it's basically vulture economics but at the nation scale. it's not great.
We have good reason to believe it'd show up here given that Kansas's TB situation has had multiple bulletins over the years
Ofc, one may conclude anything one wants,
The resurgence of TB has been the big story in infectious diseases for a while now.
Globally:
> The World Health Organization (WHO) today published a new report on tuberculosis revealing that approximately 8.2 million people were newly diagnosed with TB in 2023 – the highest number recorded since WHO began global TB monitoring in 1995. This represents a notable increase from 7.5 million reported in 2022, placing TB again as the leading infectious disease killer in 2023, surpassing COVID-19.
https://www.who.int/news/item/29-10-2024-tuberculosis-resurg...
As well as in the US:
> After declining for three decades, tuberculosis (TB) rates in the U.S. have been increasing steadily since 2020, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s a disturbing trend given that 1.5 million die from TB every year, making it the world’s most infectious killer.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/us-tuberc...
It's been a big story since the 1980s, IIRC. I remember in college in the 1990s a biologist friend explaining that TB was the greatest disease threat to public health and it was being completely ignored.
Frankly, it's hard to get worked up about it. Notwithstanding that it is a serious public health threat, there's a strong political rhetoric aspect to the discussion, both in the popular and professional spheres. It's unfortunate. In the 1980s and 1990s it was all about how Reagan decimated our public health infrastructure. The arguments aren't per se wrong, but it's difficult to gauge relevance and prioritization about the threat of TB given how part of the medical and scientific community seem to have been border-line crying wolf for 40 years. Discussion centers around absolute numbers. Tell me what the per capita relationship looks like, especially per capita among the populations most vulnerable to acquisition and disease, and what the long-term trends look like. I see this in a lot of other adjacent public health discussions tainted by political hand wringing, such as food insecurity, etc--lots of absolute numbers. But global populations are growing. The US, for example, grew by 80 million people, or 30%, between 1990 and 2020. That's not to deny that tuberculosis is a growing problem, but we have many problems. And the constant drum beat of alarm causes some parts of the community to (increasingly) react in counterproductive ways. From an individual moral standpoint, that's on them, but from an epidemiological and sociological perspective, maybe the professionals bear a little blame, too, at least in terms of communication. We could all do better.
> But unfortunately the current administration has decided an ideological purification is more important than keeping the American public apprised of threats to their health.
Looking at the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, this doesn't actually appear to be true. Going by that link you can read past MMWR reports, and they aren't (from everything I can see) doing weekly tracking of outbreaks, but rather publishing various articles about diseases the way a science journal would. I couldn't find anything about the Kansas tuberculosis outbreak in the most recent reports, so I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see anything about it in the next few MMRW reports.
And yeah, I'm aware a bigger factor in this freeze was hiding the very obvious Bird Flu pandemic. Can't hide the eggs getting more expensive though.
I think this + bad luck, really.
Eggs more expensive doesn't matter any more.
- SARSv2 (aka Covid-19) happened after Trump disbanded the team that contained SARSv1.
- During COVID, the west suspended polio vaccination programs in developing regions, so now polio outbreaks are a thing again.
- Antivaxxers in NYC caused a massive measles outbreak a few years ago.
Etc, etc.
His views most certainly aren’t what a majority of people want, and he doesn’t try to expand by doing things the majority want. If anything he paints those not completely in his camp, which is the vast majority of Americans, as an enemy.
Maybe in countries with multiple parties, proportional representation (or the like), and mechanisms to encourage voting like a holiday for elections.
But, everywhere else? It's a crapshoot..low turnout also doesn't help.
TIL Most voters don't have well defined policy preferences. Nor can they correctly associate political parties with their stated policy positions.
That doesn't mean they don't want services, that means that in addition to 74 million that voted against trump, 90 million more also didn't want him.
Because there's only been one reported car in 2025 in Kansas, I'd be surprised...
1. Is there an argument here that the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report's unbroken publication record is so important it should switch votes?
2. They probably still filled the report in, so there is a chance it eventually gets published. No need to abandon hope yet.
Why is this?
Even for poor countries it's not much. In the UK when I had it they sent a nurse round to the school and all the kids lined up and they did like one a minute. Free to us lot of course on the NHS.
I think it was quite nasty and leaves a scar though.
- TB physician since 2006
I last had one in the late 2000s
Developed in the 90's.
Approved by the FDA in 2005. Probably took a while for it to become widespread.
The thing is: The protocol for a positive skin test wasn't "Here, take this 9 month treatment." It was "You need a chest X-Ray to show it's not active. If not, you're good to go!" Especially if they know you've received the vaccine. And no one should have made you go through the treatment multiple times - it's pointless, because even if you never had the vaccine but had latent/active TB, you will always test positive with the skin test. Knowing you'd gone through treatment once should have sufficed.
I know a nurse who definitely has latent TB (i.e. no vaccine). And she never had problems after a positive skin test - her employers always knew about it and as long as she had a clean chest X-Ray, she was deemed fit to interact with (at risk) patients.
Whoever made you go through treatment was incompetent.
It sounds like they weren’t very well informed of TB protocol.
The original cases were in low income people who had been born outside the US but whose children were born in the US according to the paper.
Baffles me that someone would write something so definitively yet not expand on it in any way at all.
Not saying you're wrong (I have no idea), but what a low-effort comment. I'm curious, you seem (or claim, at least) to know something, can you help me satisfy my curiosity?
> The outbreak involved 13 people across four households in Kansas City and spanned 1 year. While a majority of the seven adults identified were born outside the U.S. in a country that had experienced a multidrug-resistant TB outbreak with the same genotype in 2007-2009, most of the six children were U.S.-born, noted Elizabeth Groenweghe, MPH, of the Unified Government Public Health Department in Kansas City, and colleagues in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
So it's either been a latent infection in someone in the first household or they traveled to their home country and brought it back, or something.. it's likely the local health department knows the exact lineage and route it took but they avoid publishing the full details for obvious reasons in this climate.
But if that is what happened, then why not publish those details? If that isn’t what happened, then why not publish those details? Facts are always preferred to conjuncture.
It looks like it is no longer standard issue here.
Supply side Jesus is just alright.
And yes. It really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things but was such a common rationale for those who voted Trump. I'm shocked that he did not in fact keep a promise thst would have benefitted the working class.
There will always be some small percentage of your society that refuses to accept what is taught in school. The US has it bad because we've had multiple "Great Awakenings" that resulted in literal cults that grew to national size (mormonism, Church of Christ scientist, Jehova's Witnesses, thousands of various "Evangelical" fundamentalist sects) that all take as a foundational belief that the entirety of modern science is a massive cover-up to prevent people from knowing about god. They explicitly believe that scientists are Evil, and in league with Satan to keep them from god.
Fully ten percent of the American public for the past 50 years, or 30 million people believe "God created human beings in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years"
Those people have always been good at organizing and have groups that are extremely motivated because they genuinely believe they are fighting a holy war against Satan. They have driven American policy for centuries, from the religious portion of the southern states insisting that god wanted black people to be slaves, to the Christians being a large portion of the temperance movement that resulted in Prohibition, to the current Book bans, to driving a significant amount of the political pressure causing Visa and Mastercard to threaten to ban pornhub (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_on_Sexual_Expl...).
A huge percentage of flat earth believers for example are there because it is the logical endpoint of "you cannot trust any scientist because they are all in league to drive you away from god's light"
If 10% doesn't scare you, consider that the same insanity around a man named Kellog insisting in "purity of spirit", as in the religious meaning, is why 90% of White men in the US are circumcised. That rate is only comparable in Israel and nations with Islamic laws.
America struggles because of religion, specifically a breed of religion that insists you cannot trust any institution but it. Note how hostile the current admin was to a Preacher preaching peace.
Their preferred religion does not preach peace.
At least smallpox has been eradicated (except for potentially some bio weapons labs), so hopefully our stupidity won’t bring that back.
So luckily that won't happen!
Remember the "illegal haitians are eating our cats" bullshit from last summer? When they absolutely weren't and they were all legal refugees anyway? Then the future President weighed in and said the US should deport them anyway?
I guess the better phrasing would be "Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is largest since (org) has been collecting data", which honestly doesn't change the implications for me.
If they then also understood that 90% - 95% of the population effectively has natural immunity, they would seriously question the ethics of vaccination.
Should a number of generations be allowed to profit from the benefits of vaccination at the cost of a loss of natural immunity in the group? Are future members of the group less entitled to this ~95% immunity, because the current generations prefer ( 100% minus epsilon ) artificial immunity?
Its easy to win a referendum in the advantage of the existing population at the cost of future populations, if those future populations aren't born yet to contest and vote against it.
From Wikipedia page on Tuberculosis:
> Roughly one-quarter of the world's population has been infected with M. tuberculosis,[6] with new infections occurring in about 1% of the population each year.[11] However, most infections with M. tuberculosis do not cause disease,[169] and 90–95% of infections remain asymptomatic.[87]
From the above it is clear that vaccination programs for TB should be strictly considered private healthcare since it can help specific individuals at the cost of collective fitness vis-a-vis TB. Governments collectivizing private medicine at the cost of group fitness ranks among the most populistic things in existence. Think of how communist systems justify their methods by emphasizing doctors and medical systems.
What exactly does the ethical axiomatization of a collective thought system look like when they look down on the ~95% natural immunity handed to them from the prior generations and simultaneously have no qualms to hand down a lower percentage of natural immunity to the next generations!
I believe they have this mistaken gut feeling that their decisions can be rationally axiomatized, more out of group think and delegation "others smarter than me are choosing this so it is probably rational"; and they are simply unaware of the fundamental inconsistencies they manifest.
Tax payer money ought not be spent on reducing the natural immunity of its taxated population, regardless of how confronting it may be to explain to the population how a lot of methods in medicine were started long before the consensus on natural selection as the origin of life and fitness took hold.
Your premise is flawed as this is a misinterpretation of what the data actually states. The statistic refers to the fact that most infections do not cause active disease. This is not the same as having "immunity." Rather, it indicates that the immune system in most individuals can contain the bacteria without eradicating it, resulting in a latent infection. Latent TB can become active under certain conditions, such as immunosuppression or aging.
Vaccination does not reduce natural immunity but aims to prevent the most severe manifestations of TB which can be fatal.
Your wider point re: the ethical argument against vaccination presumes that exposing populations to preventable diseases is acceptable to preserve a theoretical "natural immunity." However, ethics in public health prioritize the reduction of preventable harm. Sacrificing lives and health for a purist notion of "natural selection" disregards the suffering of individuals and the societal costs of disease.
If anything, the ethical failure lies in allowing preventable diseases to cause harm when safe, effective interventions exist. Future generations will inherit a world shaped by the decisions we make today. A world with widespread vaccination is one where fewer children die, fewer families suffer, and societies thrive.
For the average for-profit company, the actual business the company does has no value beyond its ability to generate profits. The damage a disruption causes today can always be offset with higher expected profits in the future.
But for many government departments, the day-to-day business is the entire point. Any disruption can easily cause irrevocable damage. Even when the net outcome is positive, the gains often cannot offset the damage, because they go to different people.
1) state's rights
2) anti-science
3) a number of people in the administration (very possibly including Trump himself) thinking that the CDC is an example of "the deep state" that conspired to keep him from winning in 2020
But, hey, Joe made groceries more expensive and the administration didn't kiss enough rear on the left side of the Dems to get Kamala elected, so, here we are.
A less nuanced answer is the HHS/CDC made Trump look bad in handling the COVID-19 pandemic and so they’re now ordered to say nothing about anything ever again.
[1]: https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FUL...
Fight the ideologues, them and their expertise are the problems.
That's so weird to me given that literally everyone where I'm from(Poland) has this on their left arm. Nothing to post on Instagram about. It's as universal as having a belly button - not having a vaccine scar on your arm would be the thing to post about if anything.
Although I do remember school being very strict about anyone whacking someone elses BCG arm.
This is misleading. Vaccines, including those for covid, generally include adjuvants to stimulate the immune system [1]. While I understand the point your making here, the covid vaccines were not syringes with pure RNA in them.
[https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/Infectious/tuberculosis/Pages/...]
Smallpox and TB vaccines both do though.
Perhaps you got a combo?
A common bacteria with airborne spread and extremely drug resistant variants in the wild can hardly be characterized this way.
However, it's extremely fair to say that this is not a new issue that has only become apparent over the past week.
My point isn't that agencies don't report incidence; my point is about when the discussion surfaces how it's discussed in the popular press, including editorializations in professional outlet. Were incidence rate flat or down between convenient points of comparison, but absolute numbers up, and an outbreak like Kansas happen, we'd be discussion absolute numbers. And even when incidence is up, the absolute numbers always headline. It's a subtle criticism I'm making, but I think an important one.
Nonetheless, while for 40 years TB has been discussed as a grace looming threat, note how absolute cases and incidence dropped steeply over most of that time. And while the drop has largely stopped, the US now has one of the lowest incidence rates in the world. But my takeaway is supposed to be that the US' TB measures are woefully broken because the drop has stopped?
I'm not sure what you gain by telling yourself that.
I could just as easily assert, without any evidence (i.e., like you), that every single person who didn't vote loves Trump and supports all his policies.
> If anything he paints those not completely in his camp, which is the vast majority of Americans, as an enemy.
That has nothing to do with whether people support him. 20 or more (exact number varies on the reporting) women say that he sexually assaulted them, he was convicted of one sexual assault, and yet white women still voted for him.
This is like a cliche from the chess world, where the guy who lost the game, then does a postmortem to convince everyone that he was actually winning the whole time. "Except for that one little blunder."
The Dems keep losing losing losing, but rather than figure out how to fight better, you instead try to convince yourself that people support you. And then you go back to debating Israel v Palestine or trans pronouns while our own country descends into tyranny. (Literally - many progressives I know.)
Meanwhile, Trump owns the White House, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court!
Yeah, I'm not the one unable to read evidence.
Polls also repeatedly show people dislike a large amount of his policies.
And it's a fact he didn't even get 50% of voters to vote for him.
You keep quoting that part and ignoring the rest of the article and the live data sources linked to it. The text of the article likely wasn’t from yesterday, as the reporter likely went around a week or two, gathered quotes, interviews, then spent some time in editorial revisions.
This happened because Trump's administration essentially copy and pasted Heritage Foundation materials rather than carefully think through a realistic budget.
(It's like NULL values in SQL, only much worse because it's in real life.)
If nothing else, I do hope this 2nd trump administration wakes those indifferent up. Yes your choice matters. And yes, choosing nothing is a choice.
The majority of people wanted this.
If you spend full budget for the first half of the fiscal year, but a final budget gets passed later that cuts your budget in half- you get no remaining money for the year, and then end up firing everyone, instead of half. This is why the federal agencies have the policy of immediately acting on the lowest proposed budget, instead of waiting to see what happens.
It's not a "rough start for HN", it's the current climate of the world through the lens of the US.
Unfortunately politics has infected areas of our lives we took for granted. The stopping of reporting coming out of the CDC/NIH/HHS makes discussing health science articles more challenging. And this is a direct result of the new administration. While this article may not be vaccine related, the new administration wants a known anti-vaxxer to lead the HHS.
I'm an old person. I have a leftist bent. I used to get along with many conservatives, I just had different policy viewpoints than they did. What we are seeing now is a completely different political landscape where one of the parties is actively setting up a dynastic plutocracy in the open.
FWIW I have a ton of criticism for the "other" party too as an ineffective mess sucking the corporate teet almost as hard, just without the actual proto fascism.
Some of us are just here as technology professionals looking to learn and keep current on the latest trends. There's nothing wrong with that.
"Only a few short months ago, I was under constant attack from various public members of the Democratic party for being a white male with center-right views. The vitriol was quite unhinged, really." when asked for specifics you went to '...on CNN for example'.
[https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/smallpox-vacc...]
As far as I can tell, German measles vaccine doesn’t cause a scar anymore than MMR (it’s a sub component).
This is all taking place on an online forum hosted in the US and managed by US entities.
And you (and like minded individuals) expect to not see US politics?
I appreciate that the US has an outsized presence on the intertubez, but you also need to realize you're first of all talking in the midst of Americans.
The ones that were published in the weeks prior to the current administration weren't talking about the Kansas tuberculosis outbreak either.
So we're not really discussing the "US federal government department agency publishing (or not) data on that outbreak." Someone's implying that's what happened, and then people are spinning off into political discussions without even looking into the link they provided to see if that was actually the case.
It's not just going off topic to discuss politics. People are actively spreading misinformation to justify going off topic to discuss politics, and lots of other people are joining in without bothering to check if what was claimed is actually true. Two-thirds of the comments now are using the claims about the MMWR to discuss politics, and it doesn't look like anyone actually looked at the MMWR to see what it actually is.
My point still stands that if someone doesn't want to see conversations regarding the US, politics or otherwise, maybe he should stay out of threads regarding the US and maybe also find other forums not hosted in America and managed by Americans where the vast majority of participants will be Americans.
It's like taking a trip to Mars and complaining that all the dirt is red, y'know?
And you didn't really offer much feedback here. Which is part of the problems. I don't really care to bicker over single issue details like this.
We are looking, quite hard, in fact. Mycobacterium tuberculosis is among the most studied microörganisms.
Like HIV, it is notable particularly for being able to defeat the attempts of the immune system cells to kill it, and it in fact infects and reproduces within macrophages. Medical researchers have done a lot to understand how this is possible and we (as in humanity) have identified several enzymes and related biomolecules which seem to be crucial to this process, which we might be able to inhibit with a targeted drug.
However, all of this scientific research has the usual problem that it is very difficult and expensive. In order to inhibit the enzyme, the drug must be absorbed by the body, and then make its way into the macrophages, and then it still must be active, and have no other toxicity to the host. It is easy to say "just inhibit isotuberculosinol synthase", but it is much harder to do.
As I understand it, this is also the reason why treating tuberculosis requires such long courses of antibiotics. When treating a normal infection, we are basically just killing most of the pathogens, and we hope that the immune system will mop up the rest. In the case of M. tuberculosis, the drugs have to kill all of the bacteria, which is why multidrug therapy is basically always used and the patient must continue treatment long after symptoms seem to have disappeared. Even when patients have recovered, they are always considered to be at risk of still having latent tuberculosis, which is why hospital screenings often feature a question like "have you ever had a positive test for tuberculosis?"
An example might be enzymes (notably in cancer research), where in the US there has been significantly less pursuit than elsewhere. To avoid attacks, I'll cite a source[0] which readers can maim rather than my comment.
0. Enzymes, The Fountain of Life DA, Lopez MD RM, Williams MD PhD K, Miehlke MD
In some pirtions of this book, entities other than pinata boy on HN, express concern regarding the quality, fairness or whatever's of research, with indications that 'research' may not always be equally noble or pragmatically guided. I suspect it's one of many where that particular subject is grazed upon. But my point is, if not overemphasized, that there may be quantity over quality issues, with viable options hiding in plain sight.
Antibiotics are found in, and derived from, nature.
Reflect for a moment on whether such a comment serves any positive purpose.
I was diagnosed with a latent TB infection received from a family member back in the early 1990's as a teen. I believe city and state departments of health must've tracked the "outbreak" back but I don't think it was ever on the news or made a big deal of. By the time we were diagnosed, the family member's symptoms weren't anything worse than their typical smoker's cough and was a heavy cigarette smoker anyway, not sure how active his infection actually was at the time but he never required hospitalization, just similar antibiotics, IIRC.
I was treated with Isoniazid (known as INH, one pill daily for a year), I never felt any symptoms from the infection or side effects from INH, they monitored monthly initially with skin prick tests then chest x-rays and after the year was up, I was done. This did prevent me from donating blood a few years after the infection was cleared; I assume there are still rules in place.
Neither the latent infection nor the year long treatment were harsh. IMHO, TB's a powerful but rather slow-moving internal infectant, and it was historically ravaging because of the earlier conditions of the world and lack of medicine at that time.
I enjoy discussions, but find it often tends to be argumentative here, so I avoid things I expect to go in that direction. Note the hostility to my use of the forbidden word in quotes. It's a thousand cuts with these kinds of compulsive prison shanks of logic that makes me awkward.
Is the idea that a different label would lead to higher compliance rates?
Compliance for a 6 month course of just about anything is difficult and more so for something that may seem asymptomatic. Oozing sores, foul oders and overt discomfort would probably help, but alas...
Natural means nothing in this context. Effective medicine is effective medicine, and there is nothing that makes TB less prone to developing a resistance to a 'natural' effective medicine over any other effective medicine.
The fear is overblown. I've known multiple people do the 9 month treatment and none had issues. One person had tingling sensation and that was resolved by an increase in vitamin intake after consulting with a neurologist.
They were in their early to mid thirties. Most problems occur when older people take the medication.
Again, this isn't some passive aggressive challenge. But I will be genuinely surprised to see this is indeed the case, which very well may be. I certainly know people who'd follow the course with perfection, and some who absolutely wouldn't.
And no country of significant size avoided it, regardless of whether they were led by Trump or not.
[1] https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...
[2] https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/exclusive-us-slashed-c...
Excess mortality per capita is the useful number to look at, since it's immune to scaling problems and the "but diagnosis!" argument. Although it may include "too scared to go to the doctor", that can't be too much of a contribution since that contribution shouldn't spike so much. Let's look at some numbers, smearing the spikes:
* in 2020-2021, South Korea's and Japan's excess death rate hovers below 5%
* in 2020-2021, Canada's, France's, and Germany's excess death rate hovers around 10%
* in 2020-2021, the US's excess death rate hovers around 20%
* in 2020-2021, Spain and the UK have spikes so high (but narrow) that I'm not even going to try to average it out. I would guess they're somewhere near the US for 2020 but better in 2021.
* in 2022, South Korea finally had a bad spike, but averaged over the year it's still only maybe 20%.
* in 2022, in almost all countries it hovers around 10%, and the timing of the swings is very similar between countries
* in 2023, in all countries it hovers around 5%
Source: first chart of https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid ; I've done the calculus by eye with rounding since I don't want to look up billions of numbers to do the math the hard way.
(Frankly, Korea and Japan did even better than these numbers say, since their population is skewed elderly in the first place)
There are cough other reasons for that as well:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-vacc...
Blaming Trump for COVID-19 makes no sense for other reasons too. There are so many other people to blame first. Fauci for funding GoF research at WIV through EHA. The CCP for being secretive and denying there was an outbreak for a while and not allowing investigations in Wuhan for over a year. The WHO for repeating CCP propaganda like claiming there was no human to human transmission roughly fourth months after the first scientists fell ill at WIV. Do you remember Pelosi and democrats downplaying the pandemic and accusing those who wanted to close borders of racism? She apparently had no regrets about all that:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pelosi-no-regrets-initial-c...
With all of this how can blame be placed on Trump? If anything his Operation Warp Speed program bailed out the planet from pandemic (with great work from vaccine manufacturers of course).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
* edit: I mean for use as ammunition in an argument. It's not that you're wrong—it's just that the cost (to the intended spirit of the site) outweighs the benefit (being right in an argument).
It's just not in the intended spirit of HN to track down contradictions and use them as gotchas in arguments. That's a narrower point. I've added an edit to the GP comment to clarify that.
My comment history, which it seems you only partially perused, demonstrates this to be true. Especially if you go back a year ago before things became politically charged around here.
I also don't see what relevance my example has to this conversation. It sounds like you're trying to corner me into a specific label (Republican, maybe?). I guess thanks for proving my point about discussions around here?
FYI if you read my post history you will see I am a libertarian leaning (Santa Cruz hippie libertarian not Rand Paul 'my dad got me the job but I believe in everyone earning their way' libertarian) refugee from the Bay Area to a small town in a very red state. I don't have the agenda you think other than calling out hypocrisy and a desire for a functioning health system.
Online communities need constant self checking and introspection to not go off the deepend. This isn’t like Reddit where you can unsubscribe from the crazy big politics subreddits or unfollow people on Twitter. I still think the old ideal of HN where we have some higher goal than yet another US political rant forum is still worth fighting for.
> I couldn't care less beyond seeing what everyone was talking about in a thread about tuberculosis in the US.
I was interested in the issue in Kansas because I read the article. 66 people almost entirely in 2 counties isn’t exactly a national statistics collection issue
>. 66 people almost entirely in 2 counties isn’t exactly a national statistics collection issue
Patient zero starts somewhere. It's not national news per se when a few individuals die of an unidentified disease either.
I don’t care enough anyway I just use HN less and less every year like all the old userbase. The only old usernames I recognize at the top of threads these days are the ones who like the politics stuff (I could list at least 4-5). Just my own nostalgia for a dying small community of thoughtful nerds.
Sure it is. This is the internet, Hacker News is just one website someone could choose not to patronize among countless others.
If you don't want to see US centric conversations, don't patronize American websites like Hacker News and certainly centralized American services like Reddit or X.
Also, if look up biological weapons research papers from Wuhan, you’ll find that many were done in collaboration with the US, and with US funding.
By mid Feb, Korea was already covertly acquiring mask materials and preparing a ramp up in testing. I believe we had working PCR tests in my local hospital by mid March, and mask rationing in April. This made me very skeptical of the competence of the US public health establishment.
Edit: Skiing was Feb 21 to 23, just before Daegu locked down. The Mask rationing started early March: https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=292662
For the first portion of your reply, I think that if TB became resistant to potatoes with licorice icecream, it would be preferable to having absolutely no recourse with antibiotics. But that's silly. If you are 100% certain that latent TB is innocuous and can't be reactivated, I must admit my logic was flawed.
Edit: is not, eg mrsa, becoming resistant to various things in the environment? Biofilms make many bacteria resistant to even alcohol. Staph, ubiquitous and thus exposed to pretty much anything a person's skin is exposed to is probably resistant to many things it previously wasn't. But it remains vulnerable to a few antibiotics, for now.
Thus, you have a misconception about the nature of TB resistance. This accounts for the pushback. People tend to forget that we all have different knowledge bases and we talk past each other.