I was reading some news articles online when this article popped up on my Google News page. It is always interesting to see not only what stories the news reporters are paying attention to, but also what the general population is talking about. This is why I chose an alternative article off of a blog instead of your everyday news site, because the public’s knowledge is as important as that of the industry. I was also interested in this because my cousins went on vacation to California over the February vacation and I had been hearing about Tuberculosis in California from what they said local newspapers were talking about.
This article is titled “Skid Row TB [Tuberculosis] Epidemic is “Alarming” But the Community is Well-Versed in Disease”. It was one of the most recent disease-related articles written, published on February 22, and can be found at this link:http://blogdowntown.com/2013/02/7146-skid-row-tb-epidemic-is-alarming-but-the-community-is-well-versed-in-disease
Skid Row is well known for many residents of Los Angeles because of its poor sanitation, crowding issues, and largest population of homeless people in the entire United States(the estimate for 2011 was 4,316 people) and a large percentage of these people are the mentally retarded and children.
(Skid Row, Los Angeles, California)
Tuberculosis, a resistant infectious disease found here, is an infection of the lungs transmitted by respiratory droplets and has a 50% death rate when untreated.
In this article, Los Angeles Police Department’s Senior Lead Officer Deon Joseph explains the connection between the poor quality of life on Skid Row and the disease rates for Tuberculosis. He also mentioned that the CDC states that rates for TB are much higher than the national average (within the entire country there have been 10,528 cases but within Skid Row there have been 80). There have also been cases of a Staph infection, HIC, and Hepatitis (A ,B, and C) and as a result the area is known as the “petri dish” of disease for local police officers.
This strong, resistant strain of TB has been connected to a “unique strain in L.A.”, the CDC states.The lungs of someone with Tuberculosis would indicate blockage and damage, as shown in the photo below.
This reminded me of the movie we watched in class about Dr. Farmer’s work in Haiti after the storm and how destruction made infectious diseases (those such as Tuberculosis, Cholera etc.) more easily transmittable. These diseases are easily transmittable within Skid Row because of drug users sharing needles, close quarters, and a lack of sanitation.It connects to the study of epidemic, infectious diseases because of the rapid magnitude that this disease has affected the residents of Skid Row, as well as the surrounding neighborhoods.
Going way back to our germ lab and seeing how easy it was for dirty surfaces to harbor disease, it is necessary that sanitation and housing for the homeless people in Skid Row be provided as quickly as possible. TB effects everyone around someone who is sick and as a result of bring transmitted through respiratory droplets can be hard to track if the person spreading the disease is an asymptomatic carrier.Also, the man we studied in class, Robert Koch, was the first to discover the Tuberculosis bacillus.
Background information on Skid Row,Los Angeles, Caliufornia gathered from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skid_Row,_Los_Angeles
Skid Row picture from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skid_Row,_Los_Angeles
Tuberculosis lungs picture from:http://www.visualphotos.com/image/1x3742857/x-ray_of_lungs_with_tuberculosis_color_enhanced
I think this problem is one of the more concerning problems and one of the saddest. It's almost hard to imagine how this problem could possibly be solved. So many people are poor and so many people are living way too close together. It makes it hard to solve this problem and prevent it from spreading. I thought it was very interesting that there is a unique strand of tuberculosis that is prominent mostly in L.A. Usually we see these kinds of unique strains in third world countries. It's interesting to think of it happening in America
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