A Change in the Wind

Multi, Extremely, and Totally Drug-Resistant TB: TDR-TB

Sometimes change is easier to hear in language than it is to contextualize in reality.

My meager understanding of tuberculosis cannot be expected to grade the seriousness of the news that several new strains of the disease have been found in populations in India and Iran.

This sounds alarming, but after all, medical researchers have tricks up there sleeve as well. This may represent less a threat to you and me than simply the fact that this disease, once slated for eradication, seems to have slipped our medical net.

Yet even the experts at Chest magazine used precisely that word -- alarming -- to describe this development. . 

What am I talking about?

Totally Drug-Resistant TB (TDR-TB)

From The Times of India:

MUMBAI: Tuberculosis, which kills around 1,000 people a day in India, has acquired a deadlier edge. A new entity-ominously called Totally Drug-Resistant TB (TDR-TB )-has been isolated in the fluid samples of 12 TB patients in the past three months alone at Hinduja Hospital at Mahim . The hospital's laboratory has been certified by the World Health Organization (WHO) to test TB patients for drug resistance.

While Iran first reported TDRTB cases three years ago, India seems to be only the second country to report this deadly form of the disease. TDR-TB is the result of the latest mutation of the bacilli after Multi-Drug-Resistant TB (MDR-TB ) and Extremely Drug-Resistant TB (XDR-TB ) were diagnozed earlier.

This frank twist in our language occured because milder new variants on this old disease had already taken their places in the lexicon, complete with acronyms; such as the strain resistant to multiple drug therapies, (MDR-TB) and the strain extremely resistant (XDR-TB).

This new strain, TDR-TB, even Cipro can't kill. 

According to a WHO study from Iran:

The isolation of TDR strains from MDR-TB patients from different regional countries is alarming and underlines the possible dissemination of such strains in Asian countries. 

30% of those known known to have contracted this new form of TB in the study conducted in Tehran are immigrants from Afghanistan. 

Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria

A New Way to Judge Others: High, Medium, or Low Fitness

A stupendous graph, part of an equally impressive health/lifestyle piece in the WSJ yesterday:

The pitch convinces without pushing a single product:

"No pill or nutritional supplement has the power of near-daily moderate activity in lowering the number of sick days people take," says David Nieman, director of Appalachian State University's Human Performance Lab in Kannapolis, N.C. Dr. Nieman has conducted several randomized controlled studies showing that people who walked briskly for 45 minutes, five days a week over 12 to 15 weeks had fewer and less severe upper respiratory tract infections, such as colds and flu. These subjects reduced their number of sick days 25% to 50% compared with sedentary control subjects, he says.

But this does offer the critically-minded a whole new "scientific" way to judge people.

Are they high, medium, or low fitness? 

Appears from the above that you can tell at a glance...

STDs Hit One Quarter of Young American Women

That statistic comes from my story in the Ventura County Reporter of a couple of weeks ago. Anyone sexually active and unattached should read the story, I dare say. Even if you think you know everything you need to know about STDs, I can pretty much guarantee you don't, having discussed it with a number of people, young and old, who thought they knew but absolutely did not.

Here's the quote that hit me the hardest, from a smart woman emotionally devastated by a disease that according to doctors is common, not dangerous, and not all that difficult to handle...physically.

The herpes social stigma really makes me mad because it is the only serious harm it does to most people who contract it. It is not fair to make us lepers. I hate the stereotype ‘herpes whore.’ I got it while being faithful to a man I loved, a guy who should have gotten a special Oscar for Performance in a Personal Life. If you have sex with anyone — and at some point nearly everyone does — you risk contracting the herpes simplex virus. We are not bad people. We are unlucky.

The devastation took about ten years of love and life from this woman, named "Jamie" in the story.

And here's a fascinating work of art via an artist named Gosia Janik called Growing Rose Out of My Herpes, which I interpret as her way of saying what Jamie is saying above...that she will not be shamed by this all-too-common disease.