Interesting ,but deadly problem
Man with 'extreme' TB may be jailed until death The Arizona Republic
A man infected with an especially virulent strain of tuberculosis has spent eight months in a hospital jail ward under a court order and may be held until he dies.
Robert Daniels has not been charged with a crime, but the 27-year-old violated the rules of a voluntary quarantine, exposing others to a potentially deadly illness. Maricopa County public health officials got a court order to keep him locked up.
The TB strain Daniels has is so dangerous that he has never met his appointed lawyer, Robert Blecher, who describes the situation as "extremely unusual."
Daniels' hospital room is designed so that air flows in, never out, to prevent the bacterium from spreading.
Daniels, who has dual citizenship in the U.S. and Russia, contracted "extreme multidrug resistant tuberculosis" while living in Russia, court records show.
He was diagnosed two years ago in Russia, and said he came to Phoenix in January 2006 after being told drugs were hard to get and expensive.
Daniels went to a Phoenix hospital with respiratory problems in July 2006, and was sent to a Phoenix halfway house for indigent TB patients under a voluntary quarantine. He was ordered to continue treatment and wear a mask when he went out in public because the disease is spread by airborne contact.
Daniels stopped taking his medication and went unmasked to a restaurant, a convenience market and other stores, court records stated.
Robert England, Maricopa County's tuberculosis control officer, said in court filings that Daniels understands the rules, but "merely refuses to follow them."
England applied for and received a "compulsory detention" order for Daniels, a legal tool used about once a year in Arizona.
Daniels, who has a wife and child in Russia, said in a telephone interview with The Arizona Republic that he didn't want to confuse people by wearing a mask and that doctors at Russian clinics where he was treated didn't even wear masks.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported there were 14,097 cases of TB in the United States last year. Just 15 were of the rare strain Daniels has. Prospects for his release are unclear. A 2006 medical assessment indicated the disease was mutating in Daniels.
A man infected with an especially virulent strain of tuberculosis has spent eight months in a hospital jail ward under a court order and may be held until he dies.
Robert Daniels has not been charged with a crime, but the 27-year-old violated the rules of a voluntary quarantine, exposing others to a potentially deadly illness. Maricopa County public health officials got a court order to keep him locked up.
The TB strain Daniels has is so dangerous that he has never met his appointed lawyer, Robert Blecher, who describes the situation as "extremely unusual."
Daniels' hospital room is designed so that air flows in, never out, to prevent the bacterium from spreading.
Daniels, who has dual citizenship in the U.S. and Russia, contracted "extreme multidrug resistant tuberculosis" while living in Russia, court records show.
He was diagnosed two years ago in Russia, and said he came to Phoenix in January 2006 after being told drugs were hard to get and expensive.
Daniels went to a Phoenix hospital with respiratory problems in July 2006, and was sent to a Phoenix halfway house for indigent TB patients under a voluntary quarantine. He was ordered to continue treatment and wear a mask when he went out in public because the disease is spread by airborne contact.
Daniels stopped taking his medication and went unmasked to a restaurant, a convenience market and other stores, court records stated.
Robert England, Maricopa County's tuberculosis control officer, said in court filings that Daniels understands the rules, but "merely refuses to follow them."
England applied for and received a "compulsory detention" order for Daniels, a legal tool used about once a year in Arizona.
Daniels, who has a wife and child in Russia, said in a telephone interview with The Arizona Republic that he didn't want to confuse people by wearing a mask and that doctors at Russian clinics where he was treated didn't even wear masks.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported there were 14,097 cases of TB in the United States last year. Just 15 were of the rare strain Daniels has. Prospects for his release are unclear. A 2006 medical assessment indicated the disease was mutating in Daniels.
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This sounds like a job for...The Natural Selectionists!!
D.0 -
quote:air flows in, never out
pressure must be building up something fierce.0 -
quote:Originally posted by He Dog
quote:air flows in, never out
pressure must be building up something fierce.
Guess we're not supposed to notice this.[;)]0 -
"a Phoenix halfway house for indigent TB patients"
Call a spade a spade.
IT'S A TB SANITARIUM!0 -
He deliberately chose to disregard the court's instructions and thereby jeopardize innocent folks around him by not wearing the surgical mask in public. He agreed to it in court but became lax about it afterwards. Because of his behavior, I have no sympathy for him whatsoever. I do hope that they can cure him quickly so that he can return to a normal lifestyle but until they do, he's better off where he is and so is the general public. IMO. 0 -
quote:Originally posted by He Dog
quote:air flows in, never out
pressure must be building up something fierce.
That's exactly the line I was going to pull from the original post!
(Don't think I'd have done it as well as you did, though).0 -
quote:Originally posted by Slow_Hand
He deliberately chose to disregard the court's instructions and thereby jeopardize innocent folks around him by not wearing the surgical mask in public. He agreed to it in court but became lax about it afterwards. Because of his behavior, I have no sympathy for him whatsoever. I do hope that they can cure him quickly so that he can return to a normal lifestyle but until they do, he's better off where he is and so is the general public. IMO.
I'm pretty freaking liberal, relative to most folks on this board, but the fact is that we will not find a cure for this guy in his lifetime.
As a left-leaning guy I'm happy to go on record saying that this guy needs to be forcibly quarantined. He is a menace to the public health.
Multi-drug-resistant TB is what we get when we don't use TB antibiotics properly. And we've been allowing people to use them improperly for half a century. In fairness, for much of that half-century we didn't properly understand what 'proper use' might be. But we understand now, and still....we allow people to mis-use antibiotics.
Here's the problem: if you use an antibiotic properly, you eliminate almost all of the organisms that antibiotic was designed to eliminate. A few will survive, but we hope that their numbers are small enough not to constitute a viable population.
On the other hand, if you use an antibiotic improperly (by applying it haphazardly, or by completing half the treatment regimen), then what you do is to kill the most vulnerable bacteria, leaving behind the more robust (= more difficult to kill) individuals to continue the population.
That definitely becomes a problem when people choose not to finish the course of antibiotics that has been perscribed to them (better for the public health that they should have died without treatment, than that they choose to take half the treatment).
But it also becomes a problem when we apply stupid antibiotics everywhere, when they are not needed. When we kill the bacteria that are easy to kill, what we do is to clear the way (remove the competition, in biological terms) for the bacteria that are not so easy to kill. Have you noticed how hard it is to find a soap that is not 'antibacterial' these days? That's us, shooting our toes off. All we're doing is creating an environment in which only those bacteria that we CANNOT easily kill, can survive and multiply.
And it pisses me the hell off.
When I can, I find the soap that is not "antibacterial" and I buy that. I've written some soap manufacturers, but I think it's a lost cause to support the non-antibacterial soaps, and I think it's a lost cause to write to the bleens who are producing the antibacterial soaps, because what is selling in this age of bioterror is...antibacterial soaps.0 -
death cures all illnesses.
he came to usa because he knew in russia the answer would have been to take behind the wood shed.0 -
quote:Originally posted by bobski
death cures all illnesses.
he came to usa because he knew in russia the answer would have been to take behind the wood shed.
Not sure I agree with that, but my father did used to say: cancer cures smoking.0
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