Fliers Exposed to Drug-Resistant TB

[cookiejar]

Fliers Exposed to Drug-Resistant TB

By Steve Sternberg,USA Today

Posted: 2007-12-31 08:47:46

Filed Under: Health News, Nation News

 

(Dec. 31) -- Health officials continued their 17-state search Sunday for passengers who may have been infected with a rare, potentially deadly form of tuberculosis by a woman on an American Airlines flight from New Delhi to Chicago.

 

The 30-year-old woman, a native of Nepal who now lives in Sunnyvale, Calif., had been diagnosed with drug-resistant TB in India, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta says. She was a passenger on Flight 293 from India to Chicago and flew on to San Francisco on Dec. 13.

 

About a week later, she checked in to the emergency room at Stanford University Hospital. "She was quite sick," says Martin Cetron, director of global migration and quarantine for the CDC. "She was at the extreme end of the severity of the disease."

 

Today, says Gary Migdol, a hospital spokesman, "she is stable and doing well."

 

She was seated in row 35; 44 people sat close enough for possible exposure. From Chicago, they traveled to California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, elsewhere in Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and Virginia.

 

The CDC recommends that they all undergo testing, with follow-up in eight to 10 weeks. The CDC is concerned because the woman was feverish and had other symptoms on the plane. The risk is believed to be small, but the deadly TB bacillus can float on air for hours and presents a greater threat in the confines of an airline cabin. All passengers considered at possible risk will be contacted.

 

Cetron says that between June 2006 and June 2007, CDC officials have been involved in about 100 similar investigations, "and the numbers are increasing." Odds are, he says, that won't change: A third of the world's 6.6 billion people are infected with TB, and more than 1 million international travelers arrive here each day.

 

"The probability that someone with TB is traveling unbeknownst to anyone is still quite high," he says. "We can only prevent this if we have a system of recognizing these cases that goes way back to the patient and their provider."

 

The World Health Organization in July set guidelines for keeping people with TB off planes. Many nations have laws of their own, but they're porous and difficult to enforce.

 

In this case, Cetron says, Stanford doctors reacted quickly when they learned the woman had been on an international flight, allowing officials to contact American Airlines "before their records were purged."

 

 

[Mother]

That is exactly how we're going to see the Bird Flu and other pandemics start.

 

I can't help but wonder how often the records are purged and how many of these 100 occurances in a year's time left people uncontacted because of the 'records'. And what about those incidences that they DIDN'T discover?

 

The fact that they are finally starting to publicize these 'incidences' makes me believe that they are doing so purposely so that the Amerincan public will not be surprised when the real threat comes.

 

Head's up people.

 

((( )))

[Belle]

Quote:

A third of the world's 6.6 billion people are infected with TB

Is it just me, or do those numbers seem just a little exagerated?

[Cowgirl]

Originally Posted By: Belle

Quote:

A third of the world's 6.6 billion people are infected with TB

Is it just me, or do those numbers seem just a little exagerated?

VERY exaggerated. That's why I always take all news with a grain of salt, at least. If I cannot verify, I remain skeptical. On the WHO website it was reported that as of 2005, the global incidence of all forms of TB was 136 infections per 100,000 people.

[Louis1]

Originally Posted By: Cowgirl

Originally Posted By: Belle

Quote:

A third of the world's 6.6 billion people are infected with TB

Is it just me, or do those numbers seem just a little exagerated?

VERY exaggerated. That's why I always take all news with a grain of salt, at least. If I cannot verify, I remain skeptical. On the WHO website it was reported that as of 2005, the global incidence of all forms of TB was 136 infections per 100,000 people.

Yes and No.

From the WHO, global incidence in 2005 was 136 per 100,000 for the disease. 1/3 of the world's population is currently infected with the TB bacillus, but most will never manifest the disease.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs104/en/

Tuberculosis
Infection and transmission

Tuberculosis (TB) is a contagious disease. Like the common cold, it spreads through the air. Only people who are sick with TB in their lungs are infectious. When infectious people cough, sneeze, talk or spit, they propel TB germs, known as bacilli, into the air. A person needs only to inhale a small number of these to be infected.

Left untreated, each person with active TB disease will infect on average between 10 and 15 people every year. But people infected with TB bacilli will not necessarily become sick with the disease. The immune system "walls off" the TB bacilli which, protected by a thick waxy coat, can lie dormant for years. When someone's immune system is weakened, the chances of becoming sick are greater.

* Someone in the world is newly infected with TB bacilli every second.
* Overall, one-third of the world's population is currently infected with the TB bacillus.
* 5-10% of people who are infected with TB bacilli (but who are not infected with HIV) become sick or infectious at some time during their life. People with HIV and TB infection are much more likely to develop TB.

Global and regional incidence

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the largest number of new TB cases in 2005 occurred in the South-East Asia Region, which accounted for 34% of incident cases globally. However, the estimated incidence rate in sub-Saharan Africa is nearly twice that of the South-East Asia Region, at nearly 350 cases per 100 000 population.

It is estimated that 1.6 million deaths resulted from TB in 2005. Both the highest number of deaths and the highest mortality per capita are in the Africa Region. The TB epidemic in Africa grew rapidly during the 1990s, but this growth has been slowing each year, and incidence rates now appear to have stabilized or begun to fall.............

[Jeepers]

They said on our local news last night that someone from the high school, in the town next to mine, has TB. The person is in the hospital and they said they won't say yet if it is a student or a teacher.

 

Nurses are going to conduct tests Monday at the H.S. for people who were in contact with the person. I assume the nurses will know who the person is since they won't tell the rest of the school. I'm sure a lot of parents would rest easier over the weekend if they could ask their kids if they had contact with the person.

 

It makes your ears perk up when they start talking about it that close to home.