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posted by n1 on Tuesday July 07 2015, @12:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the xdr-transcending-networks dept.

A patient with extensively drug-resistant TB flew from Mumbai to Chicago, and the deadly disease could become an infamous export due to problems in India's public health system

[...] Now, difficult-to-kill TB is no longer just India's nightmare. In June U.S. health authorities confirmed that an Indian patient carried this extreme form of the infection, called XDR-TB, across the ocean to Chicago. The patient drove from there to visit relatives as far away as Tennessee and Missouri. Health officials in several states are tracking down everyone with whom the patient—who is now quarantined and being treated at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland—had prolonged contact. The disease can be cured in only 30 percent of patients and sometimes requires surgery to remove infected parts of lungs. Although TB's slow rate of infection makes explosive epidemics unlikely, the Chicago episode shows how easy it might be for the illness to become a worldwide export.

Yet until recently Indian public health officials remained reluctant to admit there's a problem, says Nerges Mistry, director of the Mumbai-based Foundation for Medical Research. "They were always trying to deny it [existed]," she says. (Neither the head of India's Revised National Tuberculosis Control Program (RNTCP) nor Mumbai's main tuberculosis control official—both of whom are new to their posts—responded to interview requests from Scientific American.)

[...] If there are indeed many people with resistant germs, it heightens the chances of those pathogens leaving the country for the rest of the world. Nearly a million Indians traveled to the U.S. in 2014, compared with less than three million from all of central Asia. More and more middle-class Indians are being diagnosed with TB, and although the patient who carried XDR-TB to the U.S. was immediately placed in isolation, India has no provisions for quarantines or travel restrictions.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/supercharged-tuberculosis-made-in-india1/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ScientificAmerican-News+%28Content%3A+News%29

http://www.cdc.gov/tb/publications/factsheets/drtb/xdrtb.htm
http://www.medicinenet.com/extensively_drug-resistant_tuberculosis_xdr_tb/article.htm
http://www.who.int/tb/challenges/xdr/faqs/en/

Yes, their headline is sensationalist - but there really IS a problem here, as evidenced by the CDC, WHO, and other organizations. Perhaps the problem wasn't created by India's restructured medical school system, but it has almost certainly been increased by it.

As reported by The Times of India last year:

The SN Medical College's trauma centre which became 'functional' in 2011 is yet to conduct a surgery. This came to UP chief minister Akhilesh Yadav's attention when he conducted a surprise inspection of the centre on Friday.

[...] "Not a single serious patient has ever been treated at the centre. Whenever a minister or a dignitary plans to pay a visit to the centre, a few are admitted in the intensive care unit (ICU) to 'show' them," said a doctor, who did not wish to be named. He added that a ward boy has been put on duty in the ICU just to keep an eye that no one steals anything from there.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday July 07 2015, @02:29AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday July 07 2015, @02:29AM (#205964) Journal

    These days I blame whoever was in a position to prevent the problem yet failed to take responsibility to actually do so.

    There are cases in which prevention is more costly than after-the-fact mitigation.
    If you'd be a Windows user, you'd have known it: a bad infection may cost 1-2 days to remove reinstall/reconfigure everything and may happen once a year, the cost of running a realtime malware slows the computer down each and every second you use the computer - 1% of every year gets to 3 days worth of downtime.

    Oh, well... seems like a natural law to see increased risk-adversity in a society along its progress: we are growing wimpy by the day. The Londoners lived for 3 decades of the trouble [wikipedia.org] and the political class wasn't as hysterical as today.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @08:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @08:05AM (#206027)

    You're doing it wrong. That's why you get the wrong results.

    If your windoze gets a bad infection, all your customer data is compromized, all your "intellectual property" and business plans stolen. It's not just a question of doing a reinstall of a workstation... The right way to prevent in this example would be to run a GNU/Linux operating system where you're much much more unlikely to contact malware. And this is a very poor anyways analogy because resistent bacteria have the potential for a global pandemic we cannot treat. It's very serious stuff.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @12:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @12:08PM (#206083)

    A compromised desktop computer cannot infect your child with a deadly disease.