The old Oak Forest Hospital is slated for demolition and site redevelopment now. At one time it was a tuberculosis sanitarium. That’s when my grandmother was a patient there. She was one of the first patients who was actually cured of tuberculosis, or TB. The drugs which killed the bacteria left her deaf.
Tuberculosis and measles are both diseases that can travel quite a long way. That’s why patients with those diseases are placed on airborne precautions. You probably know there’s currently a measles outbreak impacting 13 states as I write — probably more by morning. That’s serious, make no mistake. But Tuberculosis is also a serious and much more common problem.
Every year near the end of March is World Tuberculosis Day. Normally the CDC has a massive release of data on that day. At this time I do not know whether the CDC will release that data. My local health district has already quietly released their data, which they normally hold until World Tuberculosis Day. My state has not. It is worth noting that locally, cases are up over where they were 2 years ago (but down from last year). This data is vital to me in a professional capacity to determine how much risk my patients and staff face from TB in the community.
Believe it or not there is a vaccine for TB! It was developed a couple of decades before we had a cure. We don’t generally use it here in the United States because it’s not as effective as would be desirable, we have a relatively low prevalence, and it interferes with the cheap “skin test” you may remember having done at some point in your life. But many of our nurses from places like South Korea or the Philippines have had this vaccine.
Now about curing TB. It’s not fun. Remember from the beginning of my post that the first treatments we had often had horrible life changing side effects. However, it was better than the alternative: dying. Unfortunately TB has developed resistance to many drugs over the years. It is important to treat TB even if it’s latent — meaning it’s not causing you to be very sick right now. Treatment can often involve multiple, very strong antibiotics, every day for months. In some cases, the local health department might call every day to make sure you took it.
And this brings me to another important point. People without insurance — or with lousy insurance — might not be able to afford those antibiotics. When that happens, they are not only a walking petri dish for incubating drug resistant strains of the disease, they are sharing their germs with everyone around them.
Also, tuberculosis does not care about your immigration status.
Places where people are crowded together — like jails and immigration detention centers — are a perfect place for one TB case to turn into dozens. Are you wondering how many undocumented immigrants are going to seek medical care for their TB or measles symptoms?