Tuberculosis

With more than 4 million people visiting Yosemite National Park last year ? and that number expected to increase this year ? it's no wonder lodging inside the park is snatched up quickly. "We typically sell out during the summer season," Delaware North Cos. spokeswoman Lisa Cesaro said of its Yosemite accommodations (Ahwahnee Hotel, Yosemite Lodge at the Falls, Curry Village and the housekeeping camp on the Merced River; the Wawona Hotel, and in the back country, Tuolumne Meadows Lodge, White Wolf Lodge and the High Sierra camps)

There's a $200-million hotel on the drawing board for downtown Los Angeles, so tourists from around the globe can kick up their heels at LA Live. And a few miles away on downtown's skid row, there's a TB outbreak brewing in a stew of Third World-style squalor and disorder. It's the yin and yang of our city's clumsily evolving downtown scene: We haven't managed to seal the deal for a professional football team, but we have been able to produce and sustain our own unique tuberculosis strain.

People sick with tuberculosis should not use commercial transportation for long trips because of the danger of spreading the germ in airline cabins and other close quarters, the government said Thursday. The warning came in a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about outbreaks of TB among airline passengers and crew members. But CDC officials said the risk of catching TB on a plane is still low.

A pain medication so old that "Mad Men" might have concocted its first advertising campaign might be the cure for more than 500,000 people worldwide whose tuberculosis has grown resistant to front-line antibiotics, a new study says. Oxyphenbutazone, an anti-inflammatory medication marketed in the 1950s as Tandearil and still used in veterinary medicine, put on a spectacular test-tube display of attacking both forms of the TB bacterium -- those that replicate and those that do not. It was one of 5,600 existing medications that researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College tested against drug-resistant strains of TB in a bid to expand the arsenal that could be used to fight the growing scourge.

Good news from PLoS One, the Baltimore Sun reports -- cases of tuberculosis are falling because of effective prevention measures, but the risk of drug-resistant TB is going up. Tuberculosis isn’t as common as, say, pneumonia, but it’s a brutal disease that affects the lungs and may even harm the brain, kidneys and spine. It tends to attack those with weakened immune systems: drug abusers, migrant farm workers, the homeless, the elderly. Luckily there are plenty of resources out there to find out if you have it and how to fight it: The Mayo Clinic provides some basic information and resources, including a list of TB symptoms, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a fact-sheet on drug-resistant tuberculosis.

About 200 people who work for or attend Aragon High School will be tested for tuberculosis after a student was hospitalized with the disease. The boy, whose name and grade level were withheld, was hospitalized in mid-April and later diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis, said Sam Stebbins, San Mateo County's deputy health officer. The school learned of the boy's diagnosis Tuesday.

After conducting extensive skin testing and some physical exams, Orange County health officials are convinced that no one at Orange High School contracted tuberculosis from a teenager who was diagnosed with the disease this month. "There is no outbreak of tuberculosis and no spread at the school," said Penny Weismuller, manager of disease control for the county Health Care Agency.

Nelson R. Mandela, the 70-year-old jailed black nationalist leader, has contracted tuberculosis and had been ill for days and coughing up blood when he was taken to a Cape Town hospital last week, his attorney said Tuesday. "He's very thin. He's on his feet, but very suddenly he looks very old," the lawyer, Ismail Ayob, said after seeing his client Tuesday morning.

Health officials today will ask the Board of Supervisors to approve Ventura County's portion of a $12-million statewide tuberculosis-prevention package. If the plan is approved, the Health Care Agency would receive $53,000 to spend on screening, tracking and treating people with tuberculosis, county Health Officer Larry Dodds said. "Our biggest problem is follow-up therapy," Dodds said. "This would help us get the personnel to make sure people take their medicine."

The World Health Organization on Friday declared tuberculosis a global emergency, saying the disease will claim more than 30 million lives in the next decade unless action is taken now. "Tuberculosis today is humanity's greatest killer, and it is out of control in many parts of the world," said Arati Kochi, manager of WHO's tuberculosis program, at a news conference announcing a plan to combat what has been dubbed the "forgotten epidemic."

Matthew Kennedy spent his 39th birthday at the hospital learning to walk again. Three months ago, the Venice Beach resident started having trouble moving his legs. When a chest X-ray at a Santa Monica health center revealed a shadow in his lungs, he was quickly transferred to a highly specialized tuberculosis ward 25 miles across the county at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in Sylmar. Doctors think the bacterial disease attacked his nerves - unusual for TB, which typically infects the lungs.

At least a dozen people in India are infected with a type of tuberculosis that is resistant to all antibiotics used to treat the disease. In December, the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases published an online report that documented four of the cases. This weekend, news outlets in India reported that there were actually at least 12 people with the drug-resistant lung disease. Officials fear that what they've seen so far is just the beginning, and that many more cases are lurking undetected.

Good news on the tuberculosis front: The World Health Organization reports that TB rates are dropping for the first time. The WHO 2011 Global Tuberculosis Control Report was released today at a Washington news conference, and it details the strides that have been made globally in eradicating TB. Among the 258-page report's findings: The number of people who contracted TB fell from a high of 9 million in 2005 to 8.8 million in 2010. Deaths dropped from 1.8 million in 2003 to 1.4 million in 2010, and the death rate plummeted 40% from 1990 to 2010.

Blood testing kits used to detect active tuberculosis are unreliable and should be banned, the World Health Organization warned Wednesday. The tuberculosis tests, widely used in developing countries, are dangerous because they both over-diagnose and miss true cases of the bacterial disease, the international group said in a news release. The WHO's position is based on a review of nearly 100 studies of the diagnostic tests for both tuberculosis of the lungs and of other organs.

Preliminary experiments in a handful of people suggest that it might be possible to reverse Type 1 diabetes using an inexpensive vaccine to stop the immune system from attacking cells in the pancreas. Research in mice had already shown that the tuberculosis vaccine called BCG, prevents T cells from destroying insulin-secreting cells, allowing the pancreas to regenerate and begin producing insulin again, curing the disease. Now tests with very low doses of the vaccine in humans show transient increases in insulin production, researchers will report Sunday at a San Diego meeting of the American Diabetes Assn.

In a small, dark room in this city of narrow alleys and workshops the size of shoeboxes, five men in their 70s fashion combs out of water buffalo horn with hand saws for $2 a day. "It's very hard work," said Abdul Bashir, 70. "But I've got to eat. " Members of this predominantly Muslim community of 50,000 have hacked, chipped, cut, molded and polished animal bones and horns into baubles or beads for generations. But the ornaments worn on the supple wrists and suntanned necks of far-off fashionistas carry a high price for these craftsmen, who must live with airborne clouds of bone dust that sticks to their eyes, hair and lungs.

New regulations on testing for tuberculosis bacteria helped make back-to-school immunization clinics busier than usual at Tustin Unified School District. Free clinics for school-age children and preschoolers were held Monday and last Wednesday, the day before classes started. "We've never been so crowded," said Margo Stone, nurse coordinator for the school district.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned doctors to look out for a highly contagious strain of tuberculosis that can be transmitted after only two hours of exposure. The CDC reports today in the New England Journal of Medicine that the bacterium can spread through casual contact--even outdoors, where the risk is ordinarily thought to be exceedingly low.

In what is being hailed as the biggest breakthrough since the 1960s in treatment for latent tuberculosis — noninfectious TB without symptoms — researchers said Monday that weekly doses of a cocktail of antibiotics can cure the infection in only three months as effectively as the standard treatment of daily drugs for nine months. By reducing the number of pills and shortening the time required for therapy, the new regimen increased the proportion of patients who completed treatment from 69% to 82%. By increasing the success rate of therapy, the regimen should reduce spread of the disease and the risk of inducing resistance to TB drugs, experts said.

The number of tuberculosis cases in the United States reached an all-time low last year, with only 11,181 cases reported to public health authorities, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That represented a 3.9% drop in the number of cases from the preceding year, but was a disappointment on two counts: the number of cases had dropped by 11.9% in 2009, and authorities had hoped a major decline would continue; and in 1989, health officials had set a goal of eradicating TB in the U.S. by 2010, a roadmark that was clearly not met. The agency reported in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that nearly 40% of the cases, 4,378, were in people born in the United States.