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| At risk: the young in their most productive years |
Failure to prevent and cure curable disease domestically
and globally
Re-reporting, editing, comment by Carolyn Bennett
Curable, preventable
Tuberculosis is caused by bacteria (Mycobacterium
tuberculosis) that most often affect the lungs. This disease that took my grandfather’s
life is today curable and preventable.
Tuberculosis is spread from person to person through the
air. When people with lung TB cough, sneeze or spit, they propel the TB germs
into the air. A person needs to inhale only a few of these germs to become
infected.
|
A
|
t highest risk are young adults in their most productive
years but all age groups are at risk. People
who are dually infected with HIV and TB are 21 to 34 times more likely to
become sick with TB. Risk of active TB is also greater in persons suffering
from other conditions that impair the immune system.
An estimated half a million children (0-14 years) in 2011 fell
ill with TB and 64 000 children died from the disease.
Over 95 percent of TB cases and deaths are in developing
countries.
Tobacco use greatly increases the risk of TB disease and
death. More than 20 percent of TB cases worldwide are attributable to smoking.
 |
| Neglected |
More than 4,000 people are at risk of being infected with a
tuberculosis strain, the largest outbreak in Los Angeles in a decade (source: L.A.
County Department of Public Health director Jonathan Fielding). Three hundred (300)
high-risk individuals being targeted “may have had prolonged exposure to the
strain during their stay at a local homeless shelter.”
 |
| Neglected Preventable sickness |
Los Angeles is known for “movie stars, mild climate and poor
air quality,” Katharina Schwan writes in a news report this week, “Yet media
headlines tend to skip over Los Angeles’ other claim to fame: home to the
largest stable population of homeless people in the United States.”
Downtown Los Angeles’ Skid Row, she writes, is “identifiable
by its tent-lined streets and abundance of social service facilities.
Up to 5,000 (est.) of Skid Row
residents live on the streets
 |
| Homeless Neglected |
Entirely dependent on homeless
shelters and local NGOs for everything from housing and food to medical care
When the temperature drops … Skid
Row’s most impoverished residents seek an available bed in one of the
permanently overcrowded shelters.
Tuberculosis worldwide
 |
| "War on Terror" Criminal Neglect of preventable, curable disease |
“The global burden of tuberculosis (TB) remains enormous,”
says the World Health Organization in its 2012 report. “In 2011,” the report
says, “there were an estimated
8.7 million New cases of TB (13
percent co-infected with HIV) and
1.4 million People died from TB
including almost one million deaths among HIV-negative individuals and 430 000
among people who were HIV-positive.
TB is one of the top killers of
women, with 300 000 deaths among HIV-negative women and 200 000 deaths among
HIV-positive women in 2011.
The World Health Organization (WHO) Global Tuberculosis Report
2012 provides the latest information and analysis about the tuberculosis (TB)
epidemic and progress in TB care and control at global, regional and country
levels. It is based primarily on data reported by WHO’s Member States in annual
rounds of global TB data collection.
 |
| Homeless, sheltered children |
In 2012, 182 Member States and a total of 204 countries and territories
that collectively have more than 99 percent of the world’s TB cases reported
data.|
W
|
here U.S./NATO wages war ─ “Geographically, the burden of TB
is highest in Asia and Africa,” the WHO report says.
India and China together account
for almost 40 percent of the world’s TB cases.
Southeast Asia and Western Pacific
regions, about 60 percent of the cases
African Region has 24 percent of
the world’s cases and the highest rates of cases and deaths per capita.
Multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB)
Worldwide, 3.7 percent of new cases and 20 percent of
previously treated cases were estimated to have MDR-TB.
India, China, the Russian Federation and South Africa have
almost 60 percent of the world’s cases of MDR-TB.
Eastern Europe and central Asia have the highest proportions
of TB patients with MDR-TB
 |
| U.S. war by remote |
Almost 80 percent of TB cases among people living with HIV reside
in Africa.
An estimated 0.5 million children (aged less than 15) are
suffering tuberculosis (This category of data, WHO says, is difficult to
determine and appears for the first time in its report).
CDC: TB USA
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2011
report listed among its case counts: 10,528 TB cases from the 50 U.S states
and the District of Columbia (DC) for 2011; eighteen states reported increased
case counts from 2010.
California, Texas, New York, and Florida accounted for 50
percent of the national case total.
 |
| South Central Asia Afghanistan's children |
World Health Organization “Key Facts”
|
T
|
uberculosis (TB) is second only to HIV/AIDS as the greatest
killer worldwide due to a single infectious agent.
In 2011, 8.7 million people fell ill with TB and 1.4 million
died from TB.
Over 95 percent of TB deaths occur in low- and middle-income
countries, and it is among the top three causes of death for women aged 15 to
44.
In 2010, there were
about 10 million orphan children as a result of TB deaths among parents.
TB is a leading
killer of people living with HIV causing one quarter of all deaths.
Multi-drug resistant
TB (MDR-TB) is present in virtually all countries surveyed.
The estimated number
of people falling ill with tuberculosis each year is declining but very slowly.
Drug-Resistant TB current news reports
“A growing number of people with Drug Resistant TB (DR-TB)
are people “who have never had TB treatment before” ─ a situation once the
preserve of people who had received incomplete or incorrect TB treatment ─ thus
showing “that DR-TB is becoming an epidemic in its own right,” According to a
Guardian (UK) professional report.
|
“
|
Children have been omitted from developments in diagnostics
and treatment,” the report says. “Current diagnostic tests are unsuitable for
children” as they involving “invasive procedures to obtain respiratory samples
and miss more than half of the cases.
There are no appropriate
child-friendly preparations of DR-TB treatments; this means that dosages are
often approximated, which leads to over- or under-dosing.
The potential of the new drugs will
bypass children if there are no trials looking at pediatric formulations and no
plans for new DR-TB regimens for children.
The World Health Organization figure of more than 300,000
new cases every year among notified TB cases “Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors
without Borders) considers conservative based on the growing number of DR-TB
patients in [their] projects.”
Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis is today described by health
organizations as “a public health crisis, spiraling out of control.”|
T
|
 |
| U.S./UK War on Iraq far from over |
his is the legacy of wealthy, well-armed, nuclear-powered nations engaging in endless war, chaos and destabilization, abusing power within and
beyond the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and various unilateral
and bilateral arrangements. They effectively sustain sickness and cause (by neglect or design) the
deaths of millions of people in their own countries and across the world. This is in my view both criminal and immoral.
Sources and notes
“L.A.’s Skid Row Battles Tuberculosis Outbreak”
March 5, 2013, by Katharina Schwan (The Disease Daily), http://www.healthmap.org/news/la
percentE2 percent80 percent99s-skid-row-battles-tuberculosis-outbreak-3513
“First Cases of Vaccine-Resistant Whooping Cough Found in
United States” by Lauren Edmundson (The Disease Daily), February 8, 2013, http://www.healthmap.org/news/first-cases-vaccine-resistant-whooping-cough-found-united-states-2813
“Global Tuberculosis Report 2012” World Health Organization http://www.who.int/tb/publications/global_report/gtbr12_executivesummary.pdf
“Reported Tuberculosis in the United States, 2011, Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention Highlights of 2011 Report: “Since 1953, in
cooperation with state and local health departments, the United States national
tuberculosis program has collected information on each newly reported case of
tuberculosis (TB) disease in the United States. Currently, each individual TB case report
(Report of Verified Case of Tuberculosis or RVCT) is submitted electronically” Executive
Commentary, (PDF – 222k), http://www.cdc.gov/tb/statistics/reports/2011/executivecommentary.htm
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, http://www.cdc.gov/
WHO Tuberculosis Fact sheet N°104 Reviewed February 2013, http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs104/en/
“Drug-resistant tuberculosis: we can stop this epidemic in
its tracks ─ For the first time in half a century drugs that could cure DR-TB
are being tested, but the global health community needs to act fast” (Grania
Brigden, Guardian Professional), March 1, 2013 06.02 EST, http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development-professionals-network/2013/mar/01/drug-resitant-tb-tuberculosis-drugs
“Hopes for new TB vaccine dashed following unsuccessful
trials ─ Immune system response provoked in adults not reproduced when MVA85A
booster shot administered to babies” (Sarah Boseley, health editor, guardian.co.uk)
February 4, 2013 07.00 EST,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2013/feb/04/hopes-tb-vaccine-dashed-unsuccessful-trials?INTCMP=SRCH
Hopes that a much needed new
tuberculosis vaccine was on the way, the first for 90 years, have been dashed
by trial results showing it did not protect babies against the disease.
Optimism surrounded the vaccine
candidate known as MVA85A because trials in adults had gone well. The vaccine,
developed by Professor Helen McShane, a Wellcome Trust senior clinical research
fellow at Oxford University, stimulated an immune system response when given to
adults. But the study, published by the Lancet medical journal, shows the
vaccine did not have a comparable effect when given to babies in South Africa.
[McShane said] ‘The vaccine induced
modest immune responses against TB in the infants, but these were much lower
than those previously seen in adults, and were insufficient to protect against
the disease’
“WHO-CIDA Initiative: Intensifying TB case detection ─ The
World Health Organization, through a 3 year grant from the Canadian
International Development Agency, is assisting five selected high TB incidence
countries (Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, The Philippines, Swaziland and
Vietnam) in implementing specific approaches that contribute to not only
increasing TB case detection in settings where they are applied, but also
across the entire country” http://www.who.int/tb/whocidainitiative/en/index.html
Also in current news reports
Whooping Cough first U.S. drug-resistant
Lauren Edmundson reported in early February, “In a letter to
the editor published in the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors have
identified twelve cases of pertussis [whooping cough] that do not respond to
the pertussis vaccine.
“The samples were collected from
children hospitalized in Philadelphia in 2011 and 2012. These are the first Britannica
note: Whooping cough (pertussis) is an acute, highly communicable respiratory
disease characterized in its typical form by paroxysms of coughing followed by
a long-drawn inspiration, or ‘whoop.’ The coughing ends with the expulsion of clear,
sticky mucus and often with vomiting. Whooping cough is caused by the bacterium
Bordatella pertussis.
“A huge spike in pertussis cases occurred in the United
States this year with twice as many cases reported in 2012 compared with 2011.
Twenty-one states experienced outbreaks above the national incidence levels,
and an epidemic was declared in Washington in April, bringing the nationwide
2012 total to over 40,000… Transmission often occurs from older family members
to infants or children.”
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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
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