TB – THE NASTY FACTOR

Another difference is identified between the poor /indigent and the well-off. If you work in social services like I do, you have been encouraging and referring people to TB testing for years. Frankly, there is a high correlation between the lifestyle of a homeless drug user and the factors which lead to contracting TB. And as long as this resistant strain of TB kept itself to this population, I don’t think most folks cared. And I figure that most of us would consider TB part and partial to the “nasty factor”, or due to someone’s low self-esteem, blah, blah, blah but definitely not something one worries about because one isn’t “nasty” like those other people. However, this thinking is judgmental and, from a public health perspective, dangerous. It acts as if the bacterium which causes the infection cares whether you have low self-esteem or not. Trust me, it doesn’t. It’s just your run of a mill organism looking to survive. And although you may not have the same or high level of risk factors that make you likely to contract TB, it doesn’t make contracting it an impossibility. Just the ask the guy being held at National Jewish Research Center.

But that’s what we Americans do (and probably some other folks too). We always have to find something or someone to blame. Then we trot down the path of judgment to create some new law or some sort of confinement, often not out of medical necessity (some of you may remember talk of quarantining AIDs patients back in the days before HAART), but so we can distance ourselves from the wrong-doer and somehow prove ourselves better than another. Throughout this we forget the old saying, “By the grace of G-d go I” and loose ourselves so deeply in our perceived superiority that we fail to realize that each of us is a banana peel away from many other serious and equally dangerous things, from diabetes to hypertension.

But then again, there isn’t anything visibly nasty about those diseases, eh? Andrew Speaker didn’t look sick; he didn’t fit the profile of someone with a serious, deadly disease, despite the fact that border security systems flagged him at numerous points. How easily our prejudice overwhelms our most simply policy directives? Speaker says that he has received death threats. I think those threats are misdirected. The border guards at his various stops before leaving and returning to the U.S. are the real bad guys. Someone once said that “artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity” and this case is a perfect example. Yet, us, through our news media, clamored not for their names but the name of the one guy, the nasty guy with the disease. We not only look to blame someone, we usually choose the easiest target. Instead of confronting this national security issue and figure out how we are going to train security guards not to assume that “white is right” then revamp public health laws and procedures to keep everyone’s rights and health safe, we write stupid, threatening letters to a guy who has enough to worry about.

*Sigh* But alias, if it wasn’t for the stupid things people do, what would I have to write about?