My ex-boyfriend, just back from Iraq, has been diagnosed with Tuberculosis

As have seven others from the 278th.

Any one else out there heard of troops coming back with crap like this?

He's always been kind of a sickly person, prone to catch everything, but sheesh! What a nasty thing to catch!

good grief - silly me, I thought TB was eradicated...?

I hope he is going to be alright?

But he has to take the antibiotic for it for a minimum of 9 months.

People die from TB in third World countries everyday.

Open up Pandora's box and out comse all the horrible stuff we thought was gone forever. Hope he gets well.

It keeps on reappearing. It is mainly under control, but Iraq is probably the perfect place for the disease to reappear. What you need is people with a very weak health who have been exposed to TB for a long time and have not done anything about it and then you'll get active TB which is very contagious. Since over 2 billion people in the world are infected with the dormant form it is almost impossible to eradicate.

We never adopted in the US. I've heard that the main reason it was used in the US is that the vaccine wasn't fully effective and interfered with the skin-reaction based screening. I don't know if that's true or not.

that means that you literally give everybody a tiny amount of the disease hoping that the body will react to it. But vaccination has down sides, because not every person is capable of creating the antibodies, so a small percentage will need treatment because of the vaccination.

It does intefere with the skin-reaction, because everybody who is vaccinated will test positive to TB, because they have been exposed. I don't know where the vaccination was carried out and where it was not carried out, but I do know that it's not common anymore, because of the down sides.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis


Tuberculosis vaccine
<The first recombinant tuberculosis vaccine entered clinical trials in the United States in 2004 sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). <1>

A 2005 study showed that a DNA TB vaccine given with conventional chemotherapy can accelerate the disappearance of bacteria as well as protecting against re-infection in mice; it may take four to five years to be available in humans. PMID 15690060.

Because of the limitations of current vaccines, researchers and policymakers are promoting new economic models of vaccine development including prizes, tax incentives and advance market commitments.>

or more. Because I ran into US soldiers who were foreign born in 1971 and they couldn't do the old "Tine" test in the TB screening because they were guaranteed a positive reaction.

which Britain has just stopped giving as routine to 10-14 years old, but does have some effect.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4333882.stm

To most of us, it meant a painful bruise where it was given, that lasted far too long ("no - don't hit me there! That's my BCG! OWWW!")

Consider how poor the sanitation conditions are...I constantly read where there's very little running water or reliable electricity in Baghdad...a city of several million people...imagine how poor those services are in the rural areas.

Disease has always killed more in a war than bullets. Remember that Iraq was under severe UN sanctions for 13 years prior to the invasion and one of the items that was kept out were medicines...specifically drugs to keep control of "old" diseases like TB, Smallpox and Cholera. Then add to the mess created when the U.S. military came rolling through and destroyed what little health infrastruture remained.

It'll be years after our troops are extracated from Iraq that we'll really learn about the health problems our troops face. The military will do all they can to prevent this news from getting out. It's one thing to think there's a bullet with your name and that you can survive if you "keep your head low"...that's not what happens with diseases. Think people will volunteer to go if they know they're heading into one of the biggest health disasters on the planet??

My mom was a social worker (before her retirement)... in the course of her 40 year career she contracted it twice..... right here in Norfolk, va.

becoming resistant to many antibiotics.

I had a friend who picked it up in NY somehow and had no idea until she had some tests when got pregnant.

polio or something.

Particularly with all the people in the world with immune systems suppressed by HIV/AIDS and malnutrition, there are many areas with endemic TB.

http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/2001/0122/uranium.html

TIME EUROPE
January 22, 2000, Vol. 157 No. 3

Balkan Dust Storm

As leukemia kills troops, Europe and NATO confront a mystery dating back to the Gulf War. Is depleted uranium to blame?

By MARYANN BIRD London

It sounds so eerily familiar. young men in the prime of their lives return from the war zone and fall ill with an assortment of ailments. First a tiny handful, then dozens are diagnosed with leukemia, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, skin cancer and other tumors. Still more complain of intense fatigue, muscle pain, shortness of breath, rashes, chronic infections, sudden hair loss and other physical and psychological problems. Some die. Fear grips families. Politicians and defense chiefs express concern, squabble, float theories, point fingers or issue denials. Everyone demands an explanation. Nobody has a definitive one, especially not the scientists.

In what appears to be a mushrooming European version of the controversy over the host of debilitating, often fatal, illnesses that afflicted tens of thousands of soldiers and Iraqi civilians after the 1991 Gulf War, troops who served in the Balkans are being stricken by an array of illnesses. Suspicion and speculation about the cause of the problems — loosely labeled "Balkans syndrome" — have fallen on munitions containing depleted uranium. A toxic and slightly radioactive by-product of the nuclear fuel-processing chain, DU is the key component of the tank-busting shells used in NATO's 1999 campaign to drive Serbian forces from Kosovo. It was also deployed in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1994-95, where anecdotal evidence of a leap in cancers is spreading.

But unlike the U.S. and Britain when the Gulf War cases first started to ring alarm bells, Europe's governments opted not to stonewall. In a remarkable flurry of activity, they drummed up support from the European Union's Swedish presidency and its executive Commission, stepped up health screening of Balkans veterans in several countries, sent investigators to the region and extracted a NATO pledge to provide all relevant information at the alliance's disposal to the numerous national and international inquiries now under way. Said Secretary-General George Robertson: "We have nothing to hide and everything to share."

..more..

Because if you have no clean water, no sewer system, no health care, you have a breading ground for disease like TB. We've seen the same with AIDS. AIDS caused an immense outbreak of TB as well, because the dormant disease suddenly became active and not only infected the AIDS victims but rapidly infected others.

by weaking the immune system. Heavy metals poisoning usually does that. But TB is a bacterial infection.

More than likely, he was just surrounded by a bunch of infected people. It does take constant exposure, though. He might have had an Iraqi girlfriend out there who was infected, who knows.

A lot of people have been exposed to TB, but never develop it.

Iraq's health care system has been destroyed, it's not surprising for someone to acquire TB.

My husband said lots of soldiers were getting TB while in Iraq. He was lucky and didn't get it, but my neighbor did.

I would encourage your SO to go to the media with this. People need to know.

problems.

With TB one must take ALL of the prescribed medication under penalty of jail and supervised administration if I remember correctly. I was astonished at the more than one dozen pill bottles that he brought with him when he visited me after a few months after the end of the war that left more than 300,000 soldiers on disabilty which took years for our gov't to finally cover.

He also had the bad luck to be at Kamishira (sp?) when Sadam's biological weapons (that we sold to him) were destroyed. Unfortunately his COs said that their chemical sensors were malfunctioning...

It took another 3-4 years before the Pentagon admitted that DU was even used and is only because someone managed to use FOIA to unearth the facts...

Yeah, they care about our soldiers.....

My brother enlisted before the war to help with his college tuition. When he first came back he still believed the propaganda they fed him about the need for the war. It only took a few months for him to finally realize that he and all the other soldiers had been LIED to and that the war was just for OIL.

Needless to say he is very much ANTI-War now.

world nations. TB is even on the rise in the US due to immigration.

Here is some info.
http://www.thebody.com/cdc/news_updates_archive/2003/mar25_03/iraq_tb.html

Iraq: Soldiers at Risk for Contracting TB

March 25, 2003

Large numbers of Iraqi soldiers and civilians are infected with tuberculosis and pose a long-term health risk to allied forces, said Dr. Paul Dungan, director of the Oklahoma City-County Health Department, at a World TB Day conference in Oklahoma City Monday. "That's not well-publicized. But our troops over there are at risk," he said. Dr. Jon Tillinghast, TB control officer for the state Health Department, said he expects all military personnel to be tested immediately upon returning from overseas -- and a second time three months later

One-third of the world's population has some level of TB infection. Most have a latent infection. Only 5 percent to 10 percent of people with TB will progress to the active form of the disease -- 20,000 people every day, according to the latest world health data. People with latent TB are not contagious.


.........
http://www.hopkins-tb.org/news/9-14-2003.shtml
Agency Made $100,000 Available to Buy Antibiotics to Treat Disease

Baltimore Sun (Baltimore, Maryland, USA), September 16, 2003, By Mary Gail Hare

Interchurch Medical Assistance (IMA), a nonprofit association of 12 Protestant relief agencies, made $100,000 available to buy antibiotics to fight tuberculosis in Iraq. The goal of the relief organization is to prevent a potential epidemic. The medicine, which arrived in Iraq late last month, will allow about 6,000 TB patients to continue their treatment. "The antibiotics are already being delivered to various clinics," said Kevin King, material resources manager for the Mennonite Central Committee, a church group that supports Interchurch Medical Assistance. "This is a critical way to plug a leak. It is almost as though we are preventing a major forest fire. If nothing is done, 75 million people could be at risk.” In addition to the Mennonite group, the pharmaceutical company Pfizer Inc. donated $25,000. The effort is focused on the rural areas where the supplies were nearly depleted. About 20 years ago, TB afflicted nearly 20 percent of the Iraqi population. Treatment efforts by the country's Ministry of Health as well as the World Health Organization brought that figure to 2 percent.

..........
TB of joints in kids.


Joint, Bone, Spine. 2003 Aug; Volume 70, Number 4: 282-6; Peripheral Osteoarticular Tuberculosis in Children: 106 Case-Reports; Teklali, Y., El Alami, Z. F., El Madhi, T., Gourinda, H., and Miri, A.

Click here for PubMed abstract: PubMed

The authors retrospectively reviewed 106 pediatric cases of peripheral osteoarticular tuberculosis (OAT) seen over a 21-year period in Morocco. Patients with vertebral TB were excluded from the study. The 55 boys and 51 girls had a mean age of eight years. The hip and knee combined contributed 63 percent of the osteoarticular foci. Organ involvement was documented in 32 cases. Mean time from symptom onset to evaluation was 10 months. This resulted in diagnostic delay, which contributed to the 22 percent rate of residual abnormalities such as joint ankylosis and leg length inequality. OAT is a source of functional disability that should be recognized and treated early, particularly in children, given that appropriate management can lead to a full recovery. Fourteen patients in this review had full recovery.

459th Engineers. One of them had been smoking hookahs with Iraqis, so to speak. The other was just unlucky.

MojoXN

just home from Iraq.

My husband got a bug usually only found in "third world" countries while he was in Iraq. I blame KBR for serving spoiled food under nasty conditions. Something that was brought to light about their operations in Iraq.

KBR whistleblower said: "I discovered the water being delivered from the Euphrates for the military was not being treated properly and thousands were being exposed daily to numerous pathogenic organisms."

More here....

http://halliburtonwatch.org/news/contamination.html

fuckers

Strange coincidence, because those were the points discussed earlier. The thing which was needed was a good test for the active variant only, because the passive form is widespread and harmless. And a test which doesn't give false positives for vaccinations. And it even allows to check which medication can be used without experimenting on the person either.