Welcome Everything is Tuberculosis

The series of ridiculous events continued throughout March. Mercury was in retrograde for most of it, so maybe that's why I felt like a mess. The mix of  "confusion, delays, and disruptions in communication, travel, and decision-making" (see link from Farmer's Almanac above) wasn't helped by how busy I've been.

But now it's Easter! It's April! It's Spring!

So what do I want to write about? Tuberculosis. 

In mid-March, I finished John Green's Everything is Tuberculosis. The book itself isn't just the history of the disease, but a biography of a young man named Henry who has Tuberculosis (henceforth shorted to TB) in Sierra Leone. John met Henry on a trip to Sierra Leone while they were visiting a TB hospital. Initially thinking Henry was the child of one of the doctors or nurses, John soon learned that Henry had a unique strand of TB that couldn't be treated with first or second line standard treatments. Unless Henry was approved for a new, experimental drug, his survival chances were slim to none.

I likely learned about TB from the 1990s History Channel series "Haunted History". The show took viewers to different cities and locations around the United States, United Kingdom, and parts of the Caribbean to teach history through ghost stories. TB was often one of the causes of death that wasn't violent in the show.

Of course, I learned more about TB once my history classes started focusing on the Victorian period and my English classes had us study poetry. John Keats and the Brontë sisters were well known victims of the disease, but I had no idea that George Orwell or Dashiell Hammett had also died because of TB. They lived well into the mid-twentieth century.

It wasn't until I watched an episode of "Crossing Jordan" that I learned that TB was still around. I thought it had gone the way of Small Pox. I thought it was a disease of the past that could never show up in modern society. Most TB sanitariums were the setting of ghost hunting events, not places that still took in patients. 

A few years after seeing that episode, I'm getting ready to go to college. As part of the preparations I need to get a few extra vaccines and be tested for TB. It wasn't a medical test I was familiar with. The doctor basically gave me a shallow shot and told me that if a bubble formed on my skin in the next few days, to come back as quickly as possible. False positives could also occur if the injected area was irritated or rubbed too much. I spent the next few days hyper aware of this tiny patch of skin. 

I tested negative by the way. 

TB is also a lot older than I thought. John Green explains that it has existed as long as humans have. There are mummies that have been discovered with signs of TB infections. I thought TB was a newer disease, like AIDs. 

Lungs aren't the only organ TB can infect. It can jump to the kidneys, liver, bones, skin, among other location. And TB can lay dormant in a person for years before it becomes active, which is when it becomes deadly. 

Because people didn't understand how diseases like TB spread for a long time, superstitions and incorrect assumptions became the norm. During the Victorian era, many doctors thought it was a genetic disease because it often quickly killed off entire families. Upper classes seemed to assume that the lower classes couldn't be infected with TB and it was only a wealthy and creative person's disease. 

Obviously they were wrong. Anyone can get TB. It's spread from droplets expelled by a person when they cough or spit. 

TB even caused a vampire scare in New England in the late 1800s. Mercy Brown had been the first member of her family to die of TB. However, instead of accepting the TB diagnosis, her family began to suspect that she was actually a vampire, stealing the "life force" of her family. As more members of her family died, her father and other members of the community, decided to dig up her body. It didn't look like it had decomposed at all and there was blood in her heart. Clearly, that meant she was the one causing her family to fall ill and die. Her father removed her heart and liver, burned them, then turned the ashes into a tonic for Mercy's sick brother to drink. 

The brother died two months later...from TB.

I'm not going to tell you how the book ends. If you want to learn Henry's fate, you should pick up a copy to read for yourself. I got mine out from the library.

What I will tell you, is that Henry's TB progressed into a treatment resistant strain for a couple of reasons. The biggest reason is because when he was first diagnosed as a little kid his first line treatment was continually interrupted. Sierra Leone's health care system was already over burdened before the civil war broke out in the early 2000s. Further complicating Henry's treatment was his low socioeconomic status and his father's distrust of medical advice. At one point, Henry's father even stopped him from taking his medication and took him to a faith healer instead. 

In addition to Henry's worsening illness, he also had to deal with the social stigma of having TB. In the century since TB provided a coveted look for poets and creatives to romanticize, it became stigmatized as a disease that only poor people suffer from. People didn't want to approach him or his mother (she also had TB, but responded to first line treatment).

It was the interruptions to Henry's treatment that caused the TB to mutate so that the disease could no longer be treated with the standard medications. It evolved, like many diseases do, until all known treatments were ineffective. 

One of the many reasons doctors tell you to take your anti-biotic medicine until the prescription is finished even if you feel better, is because of mutating diseases. There are now tons of diseases that used to be easy to treat, but now are resistant to standard care - many are bacterial. Viruses are also prone to these mutations. The reason we need flu shots every year is because of how quickly the flu vaccine mutates. 

Many diseases that were once thought to be "extinct" in the United States are suddenly coming back. My parents used to tell stories about measles and mumps, they knew at least one person who had gone deaf because of the common childhood disease. I never had the measles or mumps because I got a vaccine when I was really little. My parents didn't want me to suffer from a disease they knew could be deadly or, at the very least, have serious life changing side effects. 

On that note. Please check out Everything is Tuberculosis and listen to your doctors about what's best for your health and the community's health.

Oh and Happy Easter. I hope the bunny left some chocolate for you.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope y'all like hearing from me.

Until next week. 

Welcome to Modern Thoughts on a Pandemic

One of the first black and white movies I ever watched was Ghost on the Loose. It’s one of the East Side Kids/ Bowery Boys movies (basically a 30s/40s version of the “brat pack” of the 80s). The plot of the movie is about how the Kids want to get a house ready for one of their newly married friends, accidentally go to the wrong house where the Nazis are printing war propaganda (the irony isn’t lost of me), solve the “haunted house” mystery, save the USA from Nazis, and end up quarantined because one of them catches the German Measles at the end of the movie.

I distinctly remember asking my dad and grandfather once the movie was over what it meant to be quarantined. They said it meant that they couldn’t leave the house because they might get other people very sick.

To a child who grew up when the Chicken Pox vaccine was just coming out (I actually did catch the Chicken Pox because the vaccine hadn’t come out just yet), the idea that an illness could cause an entire group of people to be trapped inside (even if they didn’t have the disease) was tough to comprehend. I only ever heard about Measles because my parents would mention how lucky it was we didn’t have to worry about it. I knew about Polio from history books and knowing a nice older lady who had contracted the illness as a child.

Epidemics and pandemics were for the history books. My childhood understanding of the world insisted that doctors could cure anything.

This, of course, isn’t true in the slightest.

It wasn’t until I became interested in zombies (of all things) that my understanding of diseases began to change. The early to mid-2000s were all about the zombies. I read the Zombie Survival Guide, watched all of the zombie movies, and started researching the “what if” situations that might occur if a zombie outbreak did happen. This research lead me down a rabbit hole into the general spread of diseases and then into pandemics. To my adolescent brain, a zombie apocalypse wasn’t that dissimilar to what happened during the Black Death.

Fast forward several years and I’m in college taking a class called Mathematical Biology. It was one of the few biology classes I enjoyed, probably because it was all systems of equations and differential equations, but that’s not the point. There was some discussion of a zombie apocalypse during the class - predator/prey models are much more interesting if zombies are involved, but what really caught my interest was the SIR model or the Susceptibility, Infection, and Recovery model that is used for modeling the spread of highly infectious diseases.

A year later, I’m in my Numerical Analysis class and picking my final project. I chose to attempt replicating the spread and death rate of the 1918 pandemic. This required some manipulation of the model on my part (the most simplistic version of the model doesn’t take into account death rates and instead categorized them as “recovered” - logic being that if you’re dead you no longer have the disease).

I did a ton of research for this project and fell down several more rabbit holes into why certain cities in the US had different death rates (the flattening of the curve model wasn’t something I found, but the number of doctors in different cities because of World War 1 was - more doctors equaled more people living). My model wasn’t perfect, but I learned a lot.

The most interesting thing I learned during that project was just how likely a pandemic actually was. I’ve already lived through Swine Flu, Bird Flu, Ebola, SARS, and a few other potential pandemics, but the one we’re facing now is definitely a taste of what is likely to come in the future.

Don’t get me wrong. COVID-19 is deadly, dangerous, and should be taken seriously.

However, with climate change, over population, and the general nature of viruses - things could be and possibly might get worse. It might not be COVID-19 - though there is still potential for it to mutate a second time like the 1918 pandemic and have a worse mortality rate.

There’s also the human response we have to factor in. Already panic shopping has caused stores to run out of essentials. Schools are closing and people are being told to work from home (if they can). People who are homeless or suffer from food insecurity are going to be hit the hardest and it might not be the disease that hurts them most.

There are reports of people stock piling resources to sell at jacked up prices. Hospitals are concerned about the number of cases they’ll be able to handle. There’s a shortage of face masks and the entire country if Italy is on lockdown.

For people like me - financially secure, healthy, and can easily work from home - this is a minor inconvenience. Even if I were to catch the disease it might not be that bad for me.

But this situation isn’t just about me. There are millions of vulnerable people who are no where near as luck.

Here are some things I ask for people to do (if they are able) during this crisis:

1)  Wash your hands - Soap and water are designed to remove the virus from your skin. Use hand sanitizers in between or if you can’t get to soap.
2) If you feel sick for ANY reason - stay home. It might not be the COVID-19, but no chances should be taken. If you need to see a doctor, call in first. Even if you don’t have the virus, if you are sick your immune system is weakened and you could catch something worse. On the flip side you could also spread your illness to someone else.
3) Don’t panic buy, but if you do please donate some of your abundance to local shelters and food banks.
4) Keep tabs on your family, neighbors, or friends who may not be able to prepare or protect themselves as well. I’ve heard numerous reports of older people being scared to go shopping for fear of catching the disease. If you are healthy - see if you can help out.
5) Not everyone can work from home, please be respectful of people who are required to be present to work. See if you can help them by watching their kids or walking their pets.

Please stay safe everyone. I never imagined that I would live through a pandemic, though I always knew it was possible. Our world is not a me, it is a we.

Until next week.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off) please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope y’all like hearing from me.