Washington judge issued an arrest warrant and ordered her to involuntary detention:
A judge in Washington issued an arrest warrant Thursday for a Tacoma woman who has refused to have her active, contagious case of tuberculosis treated for over a year, violating numerous court orders. The judge also upheld an earlier order to have her jailed, where she can be tested and treated in isolation.
On Thursday, the woman attended the 17th court hearing on the matter and once again refused a court order to isolate or comply with testing and treatment—an order that originally dates back to January 19, 2022. Pierce County Superior Court Judge Philip Sorensen rejected her objections to being treated and upheld a finding of contempt. Though it remains unclear what her objections are, the woman's lawyer suggested it may be a problem with understanding, according to The News Tribune. The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, however, argued that she "knowingly, willfully, and contemptuously violated this court's orders," noting the lengthy process and numerous proceedings and discussions in which interpreters, translated documents, and speakers of her native language were made available.
[...] As Ars previously reported, the court had renewed orders for her isolation and treatment on a monthly basis since January of 2022. The health department had always said it was approaching the problem cautiously, working to keep a "balance between restricting somebody's liberty and protecting the health of the community." It sees detention as the "very, very last option."
But, the department seemed to reach a breaking point this January. In addition to the woman's defiance hitting the one-year mark, on January 11 she was involved in a car accident as a passenger. The incident clearly showed the woman was violating her self-isolation order, and it put the driver at risk of infection. Additionally, the women went to the emergency department a day later complaining of chest pain and did not tell doctors there about her active tuberculosis case, putting them and other hospital staff at risk. When they did lung X-rays, they initially suspected she had cancer. But in fact, the images showed that her tuberculosis case was worsening.
Last, she also tested positive for COVID-19, "which also strongly suggests that she is not isolating as per this court's order," a court filing from the health department said.
[...] In all, tuberculosis is one of the deadliest infectious diseases in the world, causing 1.6 million deaths in 2021, according to the World Health Organization. And the rise of multi-drug resistant and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) are considered a global public health crisis and health security threat.
Previously: US Woman Has Walked Around With Untreated TB for Over a Year, Now Faces Jail
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Recent X-rays of her lungs were so bad, doctors thought she had cancer:
A woman in Washington state is facing electronic home monitoring and possible jail time after spending the past year willfully violating multiple court orders to have her active, contagious case of tuberculosis treated and to stay in isolation while doing so.
Last week, the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department announced that it was "monitoring" a case of active tuberculosis in a county woman who had refused treatment.
"Most people we contact are happy to get the treatment they need," Nigel Turner, division director of Communicable Disease Control, said in a press announcement last week. "Occasionally people refuse treatment and isolation. When that happens, we take steps to help keep the community safe."
But reporting by The News Tribune discovered that the woman's refusal to heed public health guidance is a long-standing challenge for local officials. Documents filed in the Pierce County Superior Court and reviewed by the Tribune found that the woman's first court order for involuntary isolation dates back more than a year ago, to January 19, 2022.
Tuberculosis is a bacterial infection caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which mostly causes disease in the lungs, though it can invade other areas of the body. It can easily turn deadly without proper treatment. M. tuberculosis is transmitted through the air when an infected person coughs, sneezes, spits, or launches bacterial cells around them. Although transmission mostly occurs from close, prolonged contact, inhaling only a few of these microscopic germs is enough to spark an infection. According to the World Health Organization, tuberculosis is one of the top infectious disease killers in the world, causing 1.6 million deaths in 2021.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08, @07:56AM (6 children)
The system is kinda working. Except for the crucial bit of "violating numerous court orders" didn't put her in isolation ASAP.
Enjoy the next pandemic if infectious people are allowed to wander around for a year violating numerous court orders and infecting others before vaccines are ready and lots of people have got them.
She's probably one of those disease collectors. Go test her for unknown diseases to see if there's a covid-23 yet... 😂
(Score: 4, Insightful) by driverless on Wednesday March 08, @09:15AM (5 children)
On the one hand I respect them not trying to be too heavy-handed over things like this, but seventeen court hearings that she completely ignored the rulings from? Sheesh.
Miss one alimony payment on the other hand...
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08, @09:29AM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08, @08:20PM (3 children)
There's no such thing as "too heavy-handed over things like this".. The whole story is bogus, letting her run around like this for a whole year. On the second hearing (maybe even the first) she should have been forcefully quarantined until she was no longer contagious. It's a very simple rule.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday March 09, @12:08AM (2 children)
And then Fox News and QAnon have a field day with it, a million nutcase antivaxxers run rampant, the judge and court officials get death threats and need police protection, the courthouse gets firebombed...
I can see why they handled it the way they did.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 09, @04:07AM
So.. we just let the mob rule then, eh? Good call! Bunch of gutless pansies...
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Thursday March 09, @09:08AM
Unlikely. Conservatives have been railing against illegals bringing TB into the country for more than a decade. The characteristics of TB are well known; and the contradiction of not isolating a carrier just because she's not illegal would be too obvious.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday March 08, @12:35PM (2 children)
Unlike Covid, TB has a long, long history, with lots of research, and (mostly) effective treatments available. Is she part of some religious sect that forbids transfusions and stuff? Crazy . . .
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Wednesday March 08, @05:14PM
I wondered the same thing. My Uncle Bill had TB in the early '60s and we all had to get tested. It cost Bill, who had been on Normandy on D-Day, one of his lungs, but he survived another decade or so.
Until he was sixty, when COPD killed him after smoking four packs of Kools a day through his one remaining lung while working at a garbage incinerator.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday March 08, @08:18PM
Makes you wonder about artificial intelligence. If it wanted to kill us, we've now been alerted to the fact that we don't need Skynet; just identifying people like that, giving them incentives to participate in multiple superspreader events, and a little bit of time. If you've watched a cat torture a mouse, i can easily see artificial intelligence doing the same thing to us in the form of an experiment.
Also, from the perspective of her arrest:
Why do they need her to be placed in a facility? Isn't house arrest with an ankle bracelet good enough? Or, God forbid, are they actually trying to monitor her both as a public health risk as an infection vector, and looking after her personal health at the same time?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday March 08, @01:47PM (6 children)
Any disease that mutated to add the ability to mess with a person's thinking so that they refuse all treatment, would seem to have an evolutionary advantage. Rabies makes victims much more aggressive, prone to biting other animals. Why not mutant, mind altering versions of TB ? And COVID?
Hope they save samples of this particular infection, in case it is special that way.
(Score: 5, Informative) by HiThere on Wednesday March 08, @02:35PM (5 children)
Well, there are fungal diseases that are known to do that, even to the point of the disease itself causing a particular form of death. (First climb to the top of this plant where the birds can see you easily, lock you jaws solidly on the stem, and then die there, but keep holding on.)
There's also a disease that passes between mammal species but which can only mature in the guts of a cat, and which makes cat piss smell attractive (at least to mice). Toxoplasma gondii . It also infects humans, and MAY cause behavioral changes. (Possibly increased liking of cats or a propensity for dangerous behavior. But AFAIK this hasn't really been checked out.)
Also satyriasis is a known effect of some stages of syphilis.
So your speculation is correct. How widely spread this kind of adaptation is, however, has only been sketchily investigated. (Again AFAIK.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday March 08, @03:44PM (3 children)
Yes, I was thinking of those too. What's amazing and a little disturbing and scary about T. Gondii is how specific the behavioral alteration is. To be sure, there are side effects. But to hack the brain of an animal of considerable intelligence to reorient feelings from fear to indifference, even liking, for just cats, not dogs or any other species, you might suppose is possible but very difficult, certainly beyond the abilities of a lowly single celled organism. Yet that happens. I wonder also if gut bacteria, through some kind of chemical signalling, constantly lobby their host for more of whichever food the bacteria themselves find best for them? Give the host cravings for junk food.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08, @05:14PM
> But to hack the brain of an animal of considerable intelligence to reorient feelings from fear to indifference
Oh boy, if you're impressed with that, then wait til you try psilocybin mushrooms....
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Thursday March 09, @12:36AM
I can see how it seems amazing, but consider that alcohol which is a very simple molecule can lower human inhibition. All the microbe has to do is get the cat a little drunk (metaphorically), and suddenly it's more fun at parties.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Thursday March 09, @09:19PM
Those alterations are, in fact, simple in the sense that they trigger automatic behavior that is hard-wired in the host. The infectious agent does produce or triggers production of hormones/signaling molecules making the behavior very likely. Cat recognition is hard-wired in mice. If the fear-inducing reaction is implemented by having fear on an intermediate level in normal circumstances, causing the reaction to cease completely could induce affectionate behavior. Ants know how to climb hill-tops when things become wet. A fungus can therefore trigger this behavior. There *must* be a simple explanation in all cases. These organisms are no super-hackers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by anotherblackhat on Wednesday March 08, @03:56PM
See Jerry Wang ground breaking work on the rise of cryptocurrencies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNOLQGk7QLk [youtube.com]