Posted on 09/12/2006 6:50:19 PM PDT by blam
Rocked by Aids, Zulu kingdom now faces even worse foe: incurable TB
Doctors fear fresh fight with South African health chiefs for cash to battle new strain
Chris McGreal and Tugela Ferry
Wednesday September 13, 2006
The Guardian (UK)
The first clue to the hidden killer stalking villages in the Zulu kingdom revealed itself at a small rural hospital long besieged by epidemics. Doctors at the Church of Scotland hospital in Tugela Ferry were already grappling with the onslaught of Aids and its partner in death, tuberculosis. But some relief appeared to be in sight when, after years of criticism for its Aids policies, the South African government was shamed into providing life-saving drugs to HIV-positive people.
"We were very excited when the anti-retroviral drugs came at last," said Dr Tony Moll, chief medical officer at the hospital. "We witnessed dramatic turnarounds in the health of patients with HIV. Then we had a small group that responded magnificently to the ARVs [anti-retroviral drugs] - their immune systems were bouncing back - but they kept on getting sicker." Ten of the group died within days. Tests showed they had succumbed to a rare but virtually untreatable form of TB known as extreme drug resistant, or XDR-TB.
That was 18 months ago. Dr Moll and his colleagues raised the alarm at the prospect of an untreatable tuberculosis outbreak in a country where regular TB is already the single largest killer of people with Aids, and where one in 10 of the population is HIV-positive. They pleaded with health authorities to investigate the scale of the outbreak and to provide better means of diagnosing XDR-TB so those with it could be isolated from other patients and were not dead by the time test results came back.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
XDR-TB was created in a laboratory by white doctors to kill off HIV infected blacks.
Your tinfoil hat is on crooked.
Tinfoil hats were invented by white doctors to.. to...I'll get back to you.
OK, I believe Chandler neglected, negligently I might add, to add a "sarc tag"
Bad Chandler, Bad.
Ya, I shot from the hip. I picked up on it from the second post. Sadly, I've heard much weirder claims, so I didn't think twice about it.
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