[everforward]

Tuberculosis is different, in a very dark, utilitarian way. 4% of new TB cases are multi-drug resistant (19% of recurrences).

Once it’s multi-drug resistant, if you’re poor then you get an incredibly depressing choice. Rich countries pay for expensive drug resistance testing.

Poor countries have to answer an impossible question. You either do nothing and see if they live, or you try to guess what drugs will work and give them those. However, if you’re wrong and the treatment doesn’t work then the risk that you’ve just made the strain immune to one or more of the drugs in that cocktail skyrockets.

They get asked to either do nothing, or do the best they can today knowing it will make tomorrow worse.

TB is also shockingly infectious, which is sad. You can at least take steps to dramatically reduce HIV risk, it’s much much harder to avoid TB.

[attila-lendvai]

> TB is also shockingly infectious

let's keep HN as a place where people usually do at least a cursory research before they state things with such confidence... or inject a few words of doubt to signal that you haven't done the homework.

if you feel the urge to fight this: i lived with someone infected with TB.

e.g. measles is shockingly infectious. TB is not.

[jquery]

A single, untreated person with TB will infect 1.5 to 4 people if public health interventions don’t happen. Measles sits at 12 to 18 people per infected person.

In case anyone was curious. Depending on what your priors were, 1.5 to 4 might be shocking.

[attila-lendvai]

don't forget that untreated TB runs for years, sometimes for many years.

measles heals in weeks (and 99.9% non-malnutrished survives without lasting damage; see France prior to 1983).

[attila-lendvai]

also note the exponential function here... and an exponent of 2 and 12 are very different animals.