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from the at-least-its-not-catscratch-fever dept.
Speaking of bugs, Ars Technica carried a story about the resurgence of tropical diseases in south Texas (with a title almost inviting Betteridge's law: "Can America cope with a resurgence of tropical disease?").
One rainy Friday morning in March 2015, Dr. Laila Woc-Colburn saw two patients with neurocysticercosis (a parasitic infection of the brain) and one with Chagas disease, which is transmitted by insects nicknamed ‘kissing bugs.’ Having attended medical school in her native Guatemala, she was used to treating these kinds of diseases. But she was not in Guatemala anymore—this was Houston, Texas.
[...] “While we were calling them neglected tropical diseases, the ‘tropical’ part is probably a misnomer,” says Hotez. “Most of the world’s neglected tropical diseases are in wealthy countries. It’s the poor living among the wealthy.”
Once aggressive government-funded eradication programs finally halted local malaria transmission, the optimism of the 1950s and early 1960s—combined with the advent of life-saving antibiotics and anti-parasitic drugs—made infectious diseases seem like ancient relics.
“People thought that specializing in infectious diseases would be a waste of time because they would soon be history,” says Lucas Blanton, an infectious disease physician at the University of Texas Medical Branch.[...] Edwards knows a few things about Chagas: it is caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi and spread by a group of insects called Triatoma, or ‘kissing bugs’ (because they like to bite near the mouth). .... Chagas is a major problem in Latin America, where an estimated 8 million people are infected.
[...] Edwards’ new patient, however, had never been to Latin America. She had never even left the USA. She was, Edwards explains, “your All-American girl,” hardly a candidate for a disease that mainly infected poor, rural populations in Central and South America. ... The case has stayed with Edwards for several reasons, the main one being the mystery of how the girl became infected if she’d never left the country. But south Texas is home to the same kissing bugs that transmit Chagas. The answer, then, had to be this: she had been infected with Chagas in Texas. And she was unlikely to be the only one.
[...] Results from studies that tested donated blood for Chagas support the idea that it is a major problem in Texas. A 2014 study showed that one out of every 6,500 people who donated blood screened positive for Chagas—almost 50 times more than the CDC’s estimate that one in 300,000 Americans was infected.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday August 17 2015, @02:20AM
Having said that, I foresee a long, slow increase in such diseases just because US society and its politicians have better things to squander public funds on than public health.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2015, @02:26AM
Yeap, let the public health in the hand of corporations, what can go wrong?
(Just from curiosity and to avoid an accusation of false dichotomy: do you have a solution to suggest?)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday August 17 2015, @02:53AM
Yeap, let the public health in the hand of corporations, what can go wrong?
I'm not arguing here that we should abandon public health to the private sector. I see that as a legitimate role of a government.
(Just from curiosity and to avoid an accusation of false dichotomy: do you have a solution to suggest?)
Sure, government reduction. As I view it, a key part of the problem is simply that the federal government does too much. This allows for two relevant synergistic effects to take root. First, the greater complexity weakens the ability to govern the government. There's only so much public attention to go around and low incident of tropical disease probably won't make the threshold until someone famous gets sick.
Second, is the already mentioned squandering of resources on other things. A smaller government which is focused on delivering a few things will be better and more cost effective than one which has plenty of other activities to divert funding.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2015, @05:35AM
Yep, less government will mean the remaining people will be more focused on your pet issue....
LOL
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday August 17 2015, @11:43PM
Yep, less government will mean the remaining people will be more focused on your pet issue....
Pet issues such as government spying on its citizens? Corruption? Growing dysfunction of basic government services like roads and law enforcement? The rule of law? Yes, I want people to be more focused on my pet issues and I think they should for their own good be focused on my pet issues.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 17 2015, @03:27AM
The "open borders" zealots and traitors in Washington are actively encouraging people from Latin America to come here - and those poor people referenced in TFS are carrying those diseases. Once upon a time, the US was almost an island of health, working to eradicate disease in the rest of the world. Suddenly, we've reversed direction, and invite the diseases in.
THIS is what can be expected in a world without borders. A disease flares up in one locale or another, and it is transmitted around the world overnight. How 'bout another round of polio? Or, another flu endemic like 1918? Something like that is going to happen soon enough. You can be doubly assured that it will happen sooner, because we are breeding so many super bugs. At present, India seems to be producing an abundance of incompetent doctors who help those super bugs along. Our own "Regional Medical Centers" help to ensure that an infected person comes into contact with dozens of people, who then come into contact with hundreds, who in turn come into contact with thousands.
Yes, our health care system is hamstrug, repeatedly.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2015, @03:45AM
What a nice little package for conservative extremists.
It isn't global warming that is making the US more hospitable to tropical diseases, it is the dirty brown man bringing it in and infecting our clean white women.
> Once upon a time, the US was almost an island of health,
You mean back when immigration policy was much less strict?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 17 2015, @05:14AM
Oh, how clever - you can find racism where none exists. Isn't political correctness wonderful? You can twist a person's words to mean any damned thing you want them to mean!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2015, @05:49AM
The shoe fits.
It isn't like any racist has ever in the history of racism said they were a racist. It is always some rationalization.
How about, you be the first to actually own their racism?
(Score: 2) by Farkus888 on Tuesday August 18 2015, @03:27AM
KKK.
I hope I just fell for a troll.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Monday August 17 2015, @04:24AM
"Yes, our health care system is hamstrug, repeatedly."
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.
(W. Shakesphere)
Or... Oh my God! We're all gonna die!
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday August 17 2015, @04:44AM
(braves? No more)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 17 2015, @04:53AM
The silly poem you cite is engraved on a statue created by Frenchmen. It isn't part of the US Constitution, or even US law. The French attempted to put a curse on us with that statue.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2015, @05:08AM
The "silly poem" is written by an American poet [wikipedia.org] (a "pussy" with more cojones than the current braves?) and you stuck it to the statue yourself; don't blame the French for doing it to yourself with your own hand
Now, be a good boy, go back in on the couch in front of the TV (does it play FauxNews? non? Et alors...!?!) and enjoy your... aaa, mais oui... freedom fries! You, you... you CoW [wikipedia.org]!!!
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 17 2015, @05:47AM
Emma Lazarus only shows that the Portuguese were in cahoots with the French.
That "Coalition of the Willing" thing? Yeah, "Willing to make an excuse to get at Iraq's oil fields." No, I don't watch Faux Noise. Got any more moronic accusations you'd like to imply?
Better yet - would you care to address the point of my original post? Oh - can't do that. It might require a little thought on your part.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2015, @05:53AM
> Better yet - would you care to address the point of my original post? Oh - can't do that. It might require a little thought on your part.
Unlike inveighing against the statue of liberty. Deep thoughts by ranaway!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2015, @06:16AM
And this bears a relevance... exactly how?
I would if you'd care to express it. I can infer two:
Unless you're retarded, you could already imagine that your border is wide opened to the actual insects, they may not need a carrier to cross it; even if they do, a single tourist visiting South America may be enough to unknowingly bring a couple that will breed in the appropriate environment conditions
And...?! Would you like to live isolated from the rest of the world? Or "nuke those bug breeding ground countries from orbit"?
Yes that's the reality, your choice whether or not build yourself a prison around you, but until you do, deal with it already!
But maybe your point was something else entirely? Enlighten us, oh, you wise elder, before the age eats all your thinking neurons.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 17 2015, @12:02PM
The appropriate environmental conditions include poverty.
Moving a poor central american village from a mostly poor country to a formerly wealthy country doesn't make them rich because of the soil itself or our corrupt politicians making it rain better than their corrupt politicians. It just makes them a poor village surrounded by a formerly wealthy country. Poor villages breed disease, its not like only foreign poor people are magically able to be diseased, if you turn Florida demographically into the poorest part of El Salvador then you're not going to be able to tell the difference in disease stats. Children living on $5/day die like flies no matter the political boundaries on a map.
There are other political issues, of course. We can't call a mosquito infested swamp a swamp, then drain it, we have to anoint it as a holy wetland of gaia worship and if it kills people well thats OK because to extremists, bugs and diseases ARE more important than mere people. So we got intentional self inflicted swamp problems.
Drain the swamps and convert immigrants into americans via the melting pot integration (thus giving them american levels of economic activity instead of poor ethnic village levels of economic activity, because after upgrade they'd be actual americans not illegals) and there wouldn't be much of a problem.
Our unchosen leaders are on a holy quest to intentionally and methodically turn the USA into a 3rd world hellhole, that's the core of the problem. Most likely the goal is to FUD up the tropical disease story to raise taxes to "study" the problem. Note that the goal will not be to actually fix the problem, if anything the goal will be to increase the problem to extract more taxes, eliminate more civil and property rights, etc.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday August 17 2015, @12:29PM
Nitpicking: do I have to remind of bubonic plagues of old? Or do you think the HIV infection that killed Freddy Mercury has mistaken him for a dirt poor person? Do you think a superbug infection caught in a hospital will spare a middle-class person?
My point: poverty may give a higher chance to bugs, but don't delude yourself in thinking poverty is a necessary condition. Global warming and the extension of "tropical zones" may provide appropriate conditions too
Letting aside the form, is it then any moral difference between the motivation of environmental extremists (environ above people) and the one of corporations (profit above people)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 17 2015, @01:36PM
For the first part those are bad examples because the plague required hordes of poor people in crowded conditions with infected rats, then once a certain threshold is reached a third of the city dies, poor or rich doesn't matter much. Not enough rat-human contact or human-human contact and they live. The exotic disease argument is also bad on a larger scale because you are correct for one individual it doesn't matter but over a large scale all the prevention treatment and cure research comes from the first world or former first world countries. Africa as a continent pragmatically is never going to treat or cure or prevent ebola, at least not until its a lot richer than it is now, for now that's the burden of the first world. So destroying the USA is not going to help much in the fight against ebola. Everyone in the medical profession during the recent ebola outbreak was of the opinion that infected patients were much better off in the USA than staying in poor countries, although I suppose there could be exceptions this seems true in general. I'd much rather have a broken leg in Canada than Somalia, for example. The USA is kind of in between but that still puts it better than Somalia.
For the second part there are psychopaths in positions of leadership in both areas. I sometimes wonder how if the dice fell otherwise how many environmentalist leaders would have been oil company execs, psychologically they'd fit right in. There are motivational differences in that the corporation is trying to improve things for some small subset of humans, maybe just to make the rich richer, but one way or another its all about convincing humans to make other humans wealthier, whereas the enviros are cross species trying to convince humans to let humans suffer to benefit a swamp, for example. That's a much harder sell which explains why oil company execs are billionaires and enviro leaders are not. Its a pretty fine line comparing some people above people vs bugs above people, either way the people in general get screwed. From my species-ist perspective I feel someone trying to benefit humans (even a tiny subset) is somewhat more moral than trying to benefit bugs and diseases in a "least overall suffering of humanity" perspective.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday August 17 2015, @01:50PM
poverty is a necessary condition
Hate to reply twice but I thought of an interesting anecdotal example of my general line of thinking... I live in a river city. Rivers have swamps. We're a very rich city on a global scale, so we no longer have swamps on our river, at least in the city limits. This means that no matter how tropical the climate gets, as long as we are rich enough to control the river, we're not dying of malaria. On the other hand a poor city will not be rich enough to control the river thus people will die like flies.
Historically there have been some huge sewage based disease outbreaks. Our rich city has excellent sewage treatment and unlike some neighboring cities I could name, we have never discharged untreated sewage into waterways during rain storms, and our water supply is mostly wells anyway so even when our neighbor dump raw sewage its a big whatever for us (yeah we don't live out west, we have more fresh water than we know what to do with...) Anyway there's all manner of water borne disease that are simply no issue as long as we're rich enough to treat both our input and output water. On the other hand, poor cities like the big one to the east that unbelievably pump drinking water out of the same great lake they occasionally dump raw sewage into, well, as the standard of living economically declines, they're gonna die like flies once some water borne outbreaks happen.
Most of the time if you have enough money to keep the civil engineers employed, you're not going to get sick, at least compared to places that can't afford civil engineers. That's close enough to poverty being a necessary condition of disease...
This is before getting started on the economic effects of early treatment always being cheaper than late or no treatment in the long run, but early treatment requires money poor places don't have. A filling today is cheaper than dentures later or no teeth at all later, heart medicine is expensive but heart attacks are even more expensive, etc.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday August 17 2015, @07:53PM
General line of thinking supported by anecdotal evidence... what can go wrong?
Stricto sensu, it only take a single counter-example to demonstrate the lack of necessity.
I will agree with you that not being poor gives one a better fighting chance against bugs - it's just a matter of resources available for pushing back unfavourable conditions. But the nature of the beast is: past a certain population level affected, the infection is unstoppable.
So either:
Think "I'm are well-to-do, so nothing can happen to me" at your own peril. Seems like some countries and the majority of multinational corporations think like that when it comes to social issues/public wealth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2015, @06:27AM
Mais non, le plus vigoureuse NON!
We only recruited the sephardim portuguese and only those born in New York City!!!
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday August 17 2015, @01:01PM
That joke whooshed by you so hard it created a sonic boom.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2015, @02:40PM
If Trump is elected it will be replaced with a much larger statue of himself. The inscription will be "Losers".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 17 2015, @06:38AM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gnuman on Monday August 17 2015, @04:49AM
At present, India seems to be producing an abundance of incompetent doctors who help those super bugs along.
No, stop right there. You are completely misinformed.
Since antibiotic in our environment is the cause of antibiotic resistance, you have to look at the whole picture, NOT just doctors and their prescribing it for a cold.
1. Almost all antibiotics produced are going to farm feed. Farmers then use antibiotic laced feed to fatten up animals faster. And in cases where it's not for "fatten up animals" because of regulations or whatever, farmers and their veterinarians will just make up reasons, most being "prevent disease from spreading in the flock". This is why in nations that even ban antibiotics for fattening up animals, antibiotics usage has not decreased much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#Use_by_country [wikipedia.org]
2. Poor regulation of factory sites.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.sumofus.org/images/BAD_MEDICINE_final_report.pdf [amazonaws.com]
3. Patients.
Diseases like completely resistant TB mostly a result of patient-side issues, not the doctors. Patients interrupt their regiments. Patients can't afford to continue taking drugs. In developed nations, many TB patients have other health issues, like drug addiction, which causes issues with compliance. Patients are also putting pressure on doctors to do "something" - doctors that don't prescribe lose patients!
4. In many nations, like China or Mexico and almost all poorer nations, you can basically buy antibiotics on the street. No doctors. No prescriptions.
Anyway, I would put doctor over-prescription of antibiotics as one of the less important causes of antibiotic resistance. There are larger problems with antibiotic usage than prescribing pills on a whim.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 17 2015, @05:11AM
No, you stop right there. In fact, India is producing as many, or more, superbugs as anyone in the world. And, those superbugs have indeed been traced to a combination of factors that depends on incompetent, careless doctors who never should have been certified.
http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2013/04/23/india-has-lost-superbug-war/ [wsj.com]
A number of factors have influenced this problem, but the one factor that I believe has had the greatest impact, is privatization of medical schools.
When the Indian government more-or-less ran all the medical schools, India produced fine doctors. It might be argued that they produced the best doctors in the world, although I won't make that argument.
India's government started licensing and subsidizing medical schools, thereby opening the door to corrupt sons of bitches to get filthy rich, without actually going to the bother of training doctors.
http://www.newsgram.com/what-ails-the-medical-schools-of-india/ [newsgram.com]
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/07/india-scandal-rigged-tests-deaths-bribery-corruption [theguardian.com]
"Even by standards in India, where corruption is routine, the scale of the scam in the central state of Madhya Pradesh is mind-boggling. Police say that since 2007, tens of thousands of people have paid hefty bribes to middlemen, bureaucrats and politicians to rig test results for medical schools and government jobs. Around 2,000 people have been arrested and more than 500 are on the run. Hundreds of medical students are in prison – along with several bureaucrats and the state’s education minister. Even the governor has been implicated."
India is the second most populous nation in the world, right behind China. With a billion people inside it's borders, any nationwide medical crisis is going to be a very serious crisis indeed. Those billion people will certainly affect the rest of the world - that cannot be avoided.
You can't blame the corporate agriculture industries for the problems in India - hell, a lot of their people don't even eat meat! (I leave it to you to determine how many people don't eat meat, and why.)
While your observations are valid for the United States and western hemisphere nations that are strongly influenced by our agri-business, they do not apply on a global scale.