Fears of 'extreme' TB strain | Science | The Guardian is that it.Is this the one that wipes out mankind.
I wonder if they will decide to re-establish turberculosis sanitoriums again, due to this strain?
So far it seems to be killing those already weakened by HIV. I wouldn’t start boarding up the house just yet. If it starts wiping out otherwise healthy people with uncompromised immune systems, then we have something to worry about. Bird flu scares me more.
All the same, isolating those who are infected seems to be a good idea. This way they cannot infect those with weakened immune systems like newborns or the elderly. I think perhaps it should become mandatory for things like tuberculosis.
Human civilization survived TB before we add antibiotics, so logically we can survive TV that’s resistant to antibiotics. Nevertheless, this development certainly won’t improve conditions in southern Africa, which are already quite bad enough.
A healthy newborn does not have a weakened immune system. If breastfed, a newborn is MORE naturally immunologically protected than a toddler, in most cases.
I know they’re little a cute and miraculous, but they’re not particularly fragile. 
Well, dad, I don’t know what to make about this. Obviously, this is one badass bug and whatever it hits, it destroys. But wasn’t SARS supposed to do that? Same with bird flu. I’m not saying those diseases are eradicated, but isn’t this a little bit of germological crying wolf? Again, I’m not saying we shouldn’t try and stop these diseases (and that we’re also due for a Grand Subtraction of the human populace) but pointing to every naughty disease that pops up and saying that it’s going to be The One gets a tad old after a while. Then again, waiting until a huge outbreak occurs in an area that the United States chooses to care about isn’t the answer either.
Wait, why the fuck am I saying this here? I can just peek past the couch and tell you in person…yeesh.
Ok, then why was it recommended that you not let your newly immunized child near newborns, the elderly and those with weakened immune systems by the health department? (They told me this with both my children when I took them to be immunized.) I would think that for similar reasons you would not want to expose a newborn to TB? 
I assume you mean “vaccinated”, not “immunized”. There’s no reason to keep a recently immunized child away from babies. Only vaccines cause viral shedding which put others at risks, not immunizations.
But it’s because they assume that any older children you take them around and most adults have been vaccinated against the same disease. Newborn babies haven’t yet, and old people’s vaccinations have often worn off, or they never got them.
No one has a vaccination against this TB strain, so we’re all at risk. Although old people and babies may have less reserves (body weight is less, they’re more prone to dehydration, etc.) and get sicker if they get it, it’s not because they have weaker immune systems.
I did mean vaccinated, my apologies for mis-speaking. So, it is a good idea then to isolate those who are sick with this strain of tuberculosis at the least, if not all kinds of tuberculosis. I would hope if they do make it mandatory for people with tuberculosis to be quarentined they would put the new strain in a different sanitorium from the others.
Drug resistance in tuberculosis has been a serious and increasing problem for quite a while now. This strain is merely the latest in a long line of them.
My reaction whenever the media gloms on to some horribly terrifying new disease that they warn could wipe us all out is always the same - there are plenty of diseases that are already out there and actually exist that are killing thousands and thousands of people that should be more serious concerns. Yes, by all means keep an eye on new developments, but by any rational standard, we should be focusing our attention and efforts on the already existing diseases that are impacting so many lives now.
A newborn immune system is not magically protected by moms milk despite what the boob nazis want you to think. Babies are very vulnerable to many things that toddlers have already had time to develop immune responses for. They will have immune response to things they were exposed to in utero.
You would not believe the BS that is shoveled into the training programs for lactation specialists, I just watched my wife Cyn go through a lactation program and we were both appalled by the kind of ignorance being distributed in this particular allied health field. Every bit of the documentation we saw dripped religious agenda. This program was not put on by a religious hospital nor is the agenda uncommon in other like programs.
If you believed these programs completely you would think you would need a new class/specialty of doctor to deal with breastfed babies because they are sooo different from bottle/formula fed ones.
Sure. I agree. There’s nothing magical about it. There are, however, quite a few antibodies to quite a few things that provide a natural immunization (not vaccination) to many viruses. Not every virus, and not *this *virus, but many. This passive immunity wears off as the baby drinks less breastmilk, but her active immune response takes over. This isn’t woo-woo stuff, this is all measured and well-documented.
I still don’t think that “weakened” is the proper term for a fully functioning and mature immune system, which most full-term newborns have.
Again, NONE of us have an immunity to this TB virus. Babies are not any more susceptible to getting it than you or I. We’re all at risk.
TB is not a virus, its a bacterial infection. Incompetent might be a better term than weakened.
Yeah it is a big problem. But TB is not particularly virulent by itself: if you are HIV+ it is another story, but most people who are infected by TB (like me – I convert a skin test), never develop an active TB infection.
So I’m a bit more worried about the real baddies – bird flu is certainly up there, especially combined with the current epidemic of methicillin resistant Staph aureus (MRSA), especially the USA3000 strain, and especially especially MRSA strains containing PVL (Panton-Valentine leukocidin) mutations. We could be in for highly lethal MRSA infections, including necrotizing pneumonia, even after garden variety flu outbreaks, let alone a big one.
52 out of 53 dead. The other expected soon. This is worse than ebola. . That should get your attention. Bird flu doesn.t get those percentages.It has been percolating for a few years now.It is not a brand spanking new disease.Just evolving into a better and better killer.Or more effective survivalist.
Maybe it’s me, or maybe it’s the fact that I don’t see a real debate here, but I’m a little bothered by something gleeful in your tone, gonzomax. If you’re going to go the “hooray, humanity is done for!” route, go whole hog about it.
As for me, I’m still living in the basement, rationing my water and wearing a gas mask in the hope of avoiding the avian flu.
Quit bitin’ my style.
Hey, gonzomax. As was said above (see edwino’s post), that’s 52 out of 53 HIV-infected people. The response to TB specifically requires cell-mediated immunity, which is T helper cells and a, that’s the kind that HIV people are weakest on. So TB can sweep away HIV people with great ease. That’s been true since I was in medical school about the time HIV was recognized and it’s true today. If the same 53 people had caught pneumonia, which requires antibodies more than T helper cells (both, of course, but antibodies play a much larger role) then there would have been a correspondingly much lower death rate. Which wouldn’t have made the papers. So you would never have heard about it.
Second point: It does not say whether these were black South Africans or white South Africans, but people with European ancestors often resist TB better than people with African or Amerind ancestry. Because of centuries of ancestor exposure with resulting natural selection.
Another interesting thing about a virulent strain of TB would be that it would be less likely to spread widely than ordinary TB. Think about it from the point of view of the parasite. A successful parasite doesn’t kill its own host so fast that there is no opportunity for spread.
Of course TB kills, killed humans for all the centuries before it was treatable, but it usually killed a surprisingly small proportion of its hosts (thanks again edwino). What you may not realize is that about 1900, practically everyone in every great American city was TB+. There would have been no point in skin testing. Everyone caught their TB early, by breathing in infected droplets, and did the usual thing that healthy bodies do: they walled it off in a ring of lymphocytes and macrophages in a pulmonary hilar lymph node and a small focus under the pleura. Each of those rings gradually calcified until they had one lung lymph node made of stone (with a cheesy center) and one small ball of rock beneath the pleura. The TB bacteria were still alive inside these little masses, but motionless, in stasis, not feeding much, not multiplying. The body’s defenses camped in a ring around the tiny outpost of the enemy and kept them from getting out to cause disease.
This finding is so familiar (and was once so common on X ray of anybody getting a chest X ray for any reason) that it has a name. It is called the Ghon complex. If you follow the first link, you will notice this is called “primary” TB. Everyone had it. Everyone. No one was sick from it. And they were relatively resistant to new TB inhalations. This is what is behind the whole idea of BCG vaccination.
However, if they got sick from something else (heart disease, cancer, pregnancy), then sometimes the body’s defenses slackened. The warriors in the encampment around the TB outpost got called away. And the TB came out, and made the disease you think of as TB. This is called “secondary” or “reactivation” TB. This is the TB that causes a slow wasting death, losing weight, getting pale, coughing phlegm full of active TB bacteria; eventually coughing up blood.The slow death of consumption was romantic enough that great art was made about it not once but twice: both Mimi in La Boheme, and Violetta in La Traviata.
And it was secondary TB that killed that small percentage of its victims slowly, over years, allowing them to hack and cough in the streets and spit their infectious mucus into the puddles, so it would spread.
A TB that killed 99% of its hosts in a few weeks during which they were bedridden would limit its own spread. It would actually be less dangerous than a TB which persons could carry for a long time unawares.