49 TB patients escape from S. African hospital

[underpants]

Source: MSNBC

Patients cut wire fencing and fled isolation unit to spend holidays at home


updated 27 minutes ago
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Forty nine highly infectious tuberculosis patients cut through wire fencing and broke out of a hospital isolation unit, apparently because they wanted to spend Christmas with their families.

The mass escape highlights the problems faced by South Africa as it struggles to cope with an epidemic of virtually incurable TB that feeds off the AIDS virus and kills most of its victims. South Africa has an estimated 5.4 million people living with the AIDS virus.

There have been around 400 confirmed cases of the incurable strain known as XDR-TB, or extremely drug resistant TB. But activists say the actual number is probably much larger, because testing methods are not sophisticated enough to detect the new strain and many people die before they can be diagnosed.

A spokesman for the department, Siyanda Manana, said the 49 patients — all with multidrug resistant and extremely drug resistant TB — had escaped through holes they cut through the hospital's perimeter fences.



Read more: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22315328/

[Robbien]

1. A new kind of TB in Africa

Another article reports a new kind of Ebola in Africa.

Something strange is happening in the continent.

[KamaAina]

2. It's not just in Africa

XDR-TB is what the CDC thought the guy in Atlanta had who went ahead and flew to Europe anyway (it turned out to be the somewhat less scary MDR-TB).

[TheMadMonk]

4. Niether is particularly unusual.

MDR & XDR strains evolving in response to both overuse of antibiotics and also failure by too many patients to rigorously complete their treatment regime. It takes 6 to 12 months to effect a cure for TB at the best of times. And it is the major reason why governments resort to such heavy handed tactics as involuntary hospitalisation.


Ebola on the other hand is evolving towards lowered virulence, because it doesn't pay in the long run to kill to big a proportion of a host population, or to do it too quickly.

[Turbineguy]

3. I know a few people

I'd like to spend Christmas with if I had a deadly infectious desease, but none of them are my family.

[uppityperson]

5. Some who are going to die might differ. Might not, but may. It is sad, all the way around.

[Turbineguy]

6. Indeed it is sad

you have to wonder, was the hospital unable to organize some sort of safe visiting preceedures.