MSF video of treatment of tuberculosis in Chechnya
http://www.msf.ca/news-media/photo-gallery/medical-programs-in-chechnya/
Showing posts with label tuberculosis active. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tuberculosis active. Show all posts
Saturday, 14 August 2010
Saturday, 10 July 2010
TUBERCULOSIS: Chicago outbreak
The number of active cases of tuberculosis in Kane County stemming from an outbreak at an Aurora homeless shelter now stands at 17 following a recent screening. The discovery of new cases has health officials preparing for a long period of monitoring to ensure the outbreak doesn't become widespread in the community at large.
A few weeks ago the county screened almost 260 people served by the Hesed House. Test results show 89 people screened had a latent, noncontagious form of the infection in addition to four newly discovered active cases.
"This is not a surprise to us," Kane County Health Department Executive Director Paul Kuehnert said. "This is actually the percentage we expected in the homeless population."
Part of the spread of the infection is being attributed to a ventilation system at the homeless shelter. Tuberculosis is a contagious bacterial infection mainly affecting the lungs, but it can spread to other organs.
The county has instituted an active preventive screening system at the shelter to protect against new infections. Homeless people found with either form of the infection are receiving daily drug treatments. The county plans to do additional mass screenings every 12 weeks until no new cases are discovered. The concentration, for now, is on Hesed House, but the county plans on working with all homeless shelters in the county to institute screenings, Kuehnert said.
Early detection is a key to preventing the spread of the infection, Kuehnert said. Although the 89 cases of the noncontagious form of tuberculosis sounds like a lot, Kuehnert said it is the version health officials prefer to see.
Active forms of the infection require lengthy periods of isolation in addition to the drug treatments. Untreated tuberculosis can be lethal.
"These 89 people cannot spread the infection, so they don't have to be isolated," Kuehnert said. "And that does help us on the overall cost of addressing this."
Kuehnert said he expects it may take as long as two years before the tuberculosis screenings reveal no new cases.
The Kane County outbreak comes at a time when the rest of the state is reporting a record low in new tuberculosis cases.
http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=389505&src=5
A few weeks ago the county screened almost 260 people served by the Hesed House. Test results show 89 people screened had a latent, noncontagious form of the infection in addition to four newly discovered active cases.
"This is not a surprise to us," Kane County Health Department Executive Director Paul Kuehnert said. "This is actually the percentage we expected in the homeless population."
Part of the spread of the infection is being attributed to a ventilation system at the homeless shelter. Tuberculosis is a contagious bacterial infection mainly affecting the lungs, but it can spread to other organs.
The county has instituted an active preventive screening system at the shelter to protect against new infections. Homeless people found with either form of the infection are receiving daily drug treatments. The county plans to do additional mass screenings every 12 weeks until no new cases are discovered. The concentration, for now, is on Hesed House, but the county plans on working with all homeless shelters in the county to institute screenings, Kuehnert said.
Early detection is a key to preventing the spread of the infection, Kuehnert said. Although the 89 cases of the noncontagious form of tuberculosis sounds like a lot, Kuehnert said it is the version health officials prefer to see.
Active forms of the infection require lengthy periods of isolation in addition to the drug treatments. Untreated tuberculosis can be lethal.
"These 89 people cannot spread the infection, so they don't have to be isolated," Kuehnert said. "And that does help us on the overall cost of addressing this."
Kuehnert said he expects it may take as long as two years before the tuberculosis screenings reveal no new cases.
The Kane County outbreak comes at a time when the rest of the state is reporting a record low in new tuberculosis cases.
http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=389505&src=5
Saturday, 19 June 2010
TUBERCULOSIS: Florida San remains active
LANTANA, Fla. — The last of the nation’s original tuberculosis sanitariums sits, improbably, just off Interstate 95, near a Dunkin’ Donuts and a Motel 6, and just behind fields of children playing soccer. The fading signs out front simply say A.G. Holley State Hospital. There is nothing to suggest that one of history’s greatest killers lurks inside.
Florida lawmakers have tried for years to shut the place down. History, it seems, should be on their side. Holley’s counterparts, like the Trudeau Sanatorium in upstate New York, closed decades ago, after antibiotics nearly scrubbed the disease from the United States. These days, TB treatment usually takes place at home or in a handful of large research centers.
And yet somehow Holley remains. Sixty years after it opened, it is both a paragon of globalized public health and a health care anachronism, where strangers live together for months with boredom, pills, pain, contemplation and the same ancient disease that killed George Orwell, Franz Kafka and Eleanor Roosevelt. There used to be 500 patients here, surrounded by brush, with nursing quarters segregated by race. Now, no more than 50 live in the main building, above echoing, empty floors sometimes rented out as a location for filming horror movies.
They have all moved in, like generations past, because they are unable to control their illnesses. Some have traditional TB, the airborne contagion carried by one-third of the world’s population, which becomes a lung-wasting menace in only about 10 percent of the infected. A growing number of others arrive with drug-resistant mutations that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to treat.
Just keeping Holley air-conditioned costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, according to administrators, which partly explains the state’s interest in moving and privatizing the program.
Employees and patients, however, argue that the specialized care at Holley is a bargain for public health. Holley is a leader in research on drug resistance, and 93 percent of those who enter end up completely cured.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/health/13tuberculosis.html?src=mv&pagewanted=all
Florida lawmakers have tried for years to shut the place down. History, it seems, should be on their side. Holley’s counterparts, like the Trudeau Sanatorium in upstate New York, closed decades ago, after antibiotics nearly scrubbed the disease from the United States. These days, TB treatment usually takes place at home or in a handful of large research centers.
And yet somehow Holley remains. Sixty years after it opened, it is both a paragon of globalized public health and a health care anachronism, where strangers live together for months with boredom, pills, pain, contemplation and the same ancient disease that killed George Orwell, Franz Kafka and Eleanor Roosevelt. There used to be 500 patients here, surrounded by brush, with nursing quarters segregated by race. Now, no more than 50 live in the main building, above echoing, empty floors sometimes rented out as a location for filming horror movies.
They have all moved in, like generations past, because they are unable to control their illnesses. Some have traditional TB, the airborne contagion carried by one-third of the world’s population, which becomes a lung-wasting menace in only about 10 percent of the infected. A growing number of others arrive with drug-resistant mutations that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to treat.
Just keeping Holley air-conditioned costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, according to administrators, which partly explains the state’s interest in moving and privatizing the program.
Employees and patients, however, argue that the specialized care at Holley is a bargain for public health. Holley is a leader in research on drug resistance, and 93 percent of those who enter end up completely cured.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/health/13tuberculosis.html?src=mv&pagewanted=all
TUBERCULOSIS: South Africa coal miners
A new study has found a higher incidence of tuberculosis among coal miners in sub-Saharan Africa, the result of close living quarters, infections with HIV-AIDS and the inhalation of mineral dust inside mines. The study by U.S. and British researchers at Oxford University found that as many as 750,000 new cases of tuberculosis in sub-Saharan Africa every year may be due to coal mining. Researchers examining data from nearly 50 countries found the potentially fatal lung disease is highest in 44 countries where coal mining is a common occupation, according to Mark Lurie, a professor of community health at Brown University in Rhode Island and co-author of the study.Lurie says the normally cramped conditions in mines -- as well as the tight quarters of many simple homes --are conducive to the spread of tuberculosis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that is transmitted through the air when an infected individual coughs or sneezes.Lurie says the disease can be spread further by infected migrants who travel from one country to another to work in the mines. "And every once in a while those men go home. Now they've been exposed to a very high risk of becoming infected with TB. And they'll then therefore increase the opportunities for them to spread TB back to rural areas when they return home," he said.Experts say the incidence of TB has been on the rise for the past 20 years in the 44 African countries, from 173 cases per 100-thousand people to 351 cases currently. They say the TB infection rate is ten times higher among mine workers than in the general population.It's long been assumed that the increase in TB cases was due to the exceptionally high rate of HIV infection in Africa. More than two-thirds of all the people in the world currently living with HIV - the virus that causes AIDS - live in Africa. And HIV-positive Africans account for nearly three-quarters of all AIDS-related deaths worldwide.But Lurie points out that when researchers factored out the impact of HIV infections on the development of tuberculosis, their analysis showed that mining is also a major factor.
http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/health/Researchers-Find-Higher-Incidence-of-Tuberculosis-among-Coal-Miners-in-Sub-Saharan-Africa-95974664.html
http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/health/Researchers-Find-Higher-Incidence-of-Tuberculosis-among-Coal-Miners-in-Sub-Saharan-Africa-95974664.html
Thursday, 27 May 2010
TUBERCULOSIS: test to distinguish active from dorrmant
A rapid test that could tell the difference between latent and active tuberculosis would be a major step forward," said Dr. Jason Stout of Duke University Medical Center who presented his findings at the American Thoracic Society meeting in New Orleans.
Doctors could more quickly treat active infections, helping to limit the spread of the disease, Stout said.
Current blood tests can distinguish between people who are infected with TB and those who are not but they cannot tell whether an infection is active or dormant. It takes a culture test that grows the TB bacilli to show if it is active or not, and that can take weeks.
Stout and colleagues collected blood samples from 71 people with active TB, latent TB or no infection at all.
They added a bit of TB bacteria to the blood samples to stimulate an immune response, then measured the activity of 25 immune signaling chemicals called cytokines to try to identify a pattern that could be used as a signature of active TB infection.
"We found that a pattern of two cytokines, called MCP-1 and IL-15, was reasonably good at differentiating between persons sick with TB and persons infected but not sick," Stout said.
A third cytokine called IP-10 also showed promise at sorting between people who are infected and those who are not.
Stout said other studies have pointed to these three cytokines individually as possible TB markers, but his is the first to put all three together as a possible TB test.
"These findings could lead to earlier diagnosis of active tuberculosis, which could be beneficial for both the sick person and others around her or him who might be spared from infection," Stout said in a statement.
Tuberculosis killed 1.8 million people in 2008, or nearly 5,000 people a day. It is caused by the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria. More than 2 billion people, or about a third of the world's population, are thought to be infected.
It is not only a scourge in poor countries but also in the West, where it has flared anew in the last 20 years because of AIDS, which weakens the immune system.
TB can be cured with antibiotics, but they need to be taken daily for months to be effective. Because people often skip doses, multiple drug resistant forms are spreading and the World Health Organization says the hard-to-treat infection is spreading.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64F23P20100516
Doctors could more quickly treat active infections, helping to limit the spread of the disease, Stout said.
Current blood tests can distinguish between people who are infected with TB and those who are not but they cannot tell whether an infection is active or dormant. It takes a culture test that grows the TB bacilli to show if it is active or not, and that can take weeks.
Stout and colleagues collected blood samples from 71 people with active TB, latent TB or no infection at all.
They added a bit of TB bacteria to the blood samples to stimulate an immune response, then measured the activity of 25 immune signaling chemicals called cytokines to try to identify a pattern that could be used as a signature of active TB infection.
"We found that a pattern of two cytokines, called MCP-1 and IL-15, was reasonably good at differentiating between persons sick with TB and persons infected but not sick," Stout said.
A third cytokine called IP-10 also showed promise at sorting between people who are infected and those who are not.
Stout said other studies have pointed to these three cytokines individually as possible TB markers, but his is the first to put all three together as a possible TB test.
"These findings could lead to earlier diagnosis of active tuberculosis, which could be beneficial for both the sick person and others around her or him who might be spared from infection," Stout said in a statement.
Tuberculosis killed 1.8 million people in 2008, or nearly 5,000 people a day. It is caused by the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria. More than 2 billion people, or about a third of the world's population, are thought to be infected.
It is not only a scourge in poor countries but also in the West, where it has flared anew in the last 20 years because of AIDS, which weakens the immune system.
TB can be cured with antibiotics, but they need to be taken daily for months to be effective. Because people often skip doses, multiple drug resistant forms are spreading and the World Health Organization says the hard-to-treat infection is spreading.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64F23P20100516
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