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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.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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday July 07 2015, @01:31AM
My concept of who to blame when somethi bad happens has evolved considerably over the years. Instead of blaming the perpetrator, I have come to regard people who do bad things as simply doing what comes natural.
These days I blame whoever was in a position to prevent the problem yet failed to take responsibility to actually do so.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 07 2015, @02:14AM
Hmmmmm. US Customs isn't exactly tasked with checking the health of visitors and immigrants. Not that I've seen, anyway. Sure, they might stop an obviously ill person, but they don't do blood tests and such.
The latter part of the post refers to today's medical schools in India. Some years ago, a graduate from a medical school in India was highly regarded. Today, not so much. What has happened? Medical schools have been, at the same time, privatized, and subsidized. I've read a number of stories, like the one linked to, which show that a medical college might not see a patient for months, but when a scheduled inspection is about to take place, the staff runs out into the town to find "patients" to fill the beds. Consequently, the students are getting almost no medical training at all, and certainly no practical experience.
It's amazing what a little corruption can accomplish in just a few short years. Today, India has unqualified "doctors" prescribing random drugs for diseases they've never seen, let alone treated.
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday July 07 2015, @02:49AM
Well, why so amazed? Corruption grows exponential* - the more corrupts, the easier it becomes to corrupt others - what you see may a the result of tens of years of "benign corruption"
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* actually I suspect Lotka-Volterra equations may be a better model - pretty much like the evolution of an infectious disease, until the system either reaches an equilibrium under endemic corruption or collapses and drives the corrupt population down to atto-foxes.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday July 07 2015, @06:31AM
India provides a very basic food ration to its population - a few kilos of grain and beans each month. But it is estimated that only 15% of that food reaches those who it is intended for.
Many regard India, Mexico and other developing nations as desperately poor. In reality they are fabulously wealthy but that wealth is quite inequitably distributed, in large part due to corruption.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday July 07 2015, @02:29AM
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/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @08:05AM
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
A compromised desktop computer cannot infect your child with a deadly disease.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday July 07 2015, @03:46AM
These days I blame whoever was in a position to prevent the problem yet failed to take responsibility to actually do so.
I think Hanlon's Razor is in order here:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
In this case you can substitute simile ignorance for stupidity. I don't believe Customs and Immigration officers in airports are trained to detect asymptomatic diseases. And if the disease was actually as "extensive" as the article mentions, the Indian authorities are still the ones who let her on the plane.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2015, @04:38AM
Doesn't that mean there are two classes of people, then? Those who are elite enough to be responsible for themselves and the rest who might as well be cattle?