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by GeekyBear
508 days ago
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> This is the type of thing that'd normally show up on CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report The resurgence of TB has been the big story in infectious diseases for a while now. Globally: > The World Health Organization (WHO) today published a new report on tuberculosis revealing that approximately 8.2 million people were newly diagnosed with TB in 2023 – the highest number recorded since WHO began global TB monitoring in 1995. This represents a notable increase from 7.5 million reported in 2022, placing TB again as the leading infectious disease killer in 2023, surpassing COVID-19. https://www.who.int/news/item/29-10-2024-tuberculosis-resurg... As well as in the US: > After declining for three decades, tuberculosis (TB) rates in the U.S. have been increasing steadily since 2020, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It’s a disturbing trend given that 1.5 million die from TB every year, making it the world’s most infectious killer. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/us-tuberc... |
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It's been a big story since the 1980s, IIRC. I remember in college in the 1990s a biologist friend explaining that TB was the greatest disease threat to public health and it was being completely ignored.
Frankly, it's hard to get worked up about it. Notwithstanding that it is a serious public health threat, there's a strong political rhetoric aspect to the discussion, both in the popular and professional spheres. It's unfortunate. In the 1980s and 1990s it was all about how Reagan decimated our public health infrastructure. The arguments aren't per se wrong, but it's difficult to gauge relevance and prioritization about the threat of TB given how part of the medical and scientific community seem to have been border-line crying wolf for 40 years. Discussion centers around absolute numbers. Tell me what the per capita relationship looks like, especially per capita among the populations most vulnerable to acquisition and disease, and what the long-term trends look like. I see this in a lot of other adjacent public health discussions tainted by political hand wringing, such as food insecurity, etc--lots of absolute numbers. But global populations are growing. The US, for example, grew by 80 million people, or 30%, between 1990 and 2020. That's not to deny that tuberculosis is a growing problem, but we have many problems. And the constant drum beat of alarm causes some parts of the community to (increasingly) react in counterproductive ways. From an individual moral standpoint, that's on them, but from an epidemiological and sociological perspective, maybe the professionals bear a little blame, too, at least in terms of communication. We could all do better.