Merry Christmas, Have some Tuberculosis!!!

[woad&fangs]

49 Drug resistant TB patients escape a south african hospital to spend the holidays with family and friends.
The Dumb fricks.

If I had a contagious drug resistant disease I'd try to avoid direct contact with my friends and family.

I'm a bit conflicted on the practice of forced quarantine but these patients are too stupid to make the descision themselves.

[Scurvy]

I'm a bit conflicted on the practice of forced quarantine but these patients are too stupid to make the descision themselves.

which explains why forced quarantine is necessary...

[CountArach]

I'm a bit conflicted on the practice of forced quarantine but these patients are too stupid to make the descision themselves.

How very patronising.

I don't believe I know enough about the spread of TB to be able to make an informed decision on this one.

[Tribesman]

I don't believe I know enough about the spread of TB to be able to make an informed decision on this one.

Well if you are requested for testing for TB because you have been in a pub where there was someone who had been on a plane where there was someone who was found to have TB then it might inform you a little more about the possibilties of spreading this little beauty .

[Xiahou]

How very patronising.

I don't believe I know enough about the spread of TB to be able to make an informed decision on this one.

Here's a primer from Wikipedia:

When people suffering from active pulmonary TB cough, sneeze, speak, kiss, or spit, they expel infectious aerosol droplets 0.5 to 5 µm in diameter. A single sneeze, for instance, can release up to 40,000 droplets.[17] Each one of these droplets may transmit the disease, since the infectious dose of tuberculosis is very low and the inhalation of just a single bacterium can cause a new infection.

People with prolonged, frequent, or intense contact are at particularly high risk of becoming infected, with an estimated 22% infection rate. A person with active but untreated tuberculosis can infect 10–15 other people per year.[2] Others at risk include people in areas where TB is common, people who inject illicit drugs (especially when sharing needles), residents and employees of high-risk congregate settings, medically under-served and low-income populations, high-risk racial or ethnic minority populations, children exposed to adults in high-risk categories, patients immunocompromised by conditions such as HIV/AIDS, people who take immunosuppressant drugs, and health care workers serving these high-risk clients.[19]

Transmission can only occur from people with active—not latent—TB. The probability of transmission from one person to another depends upon the number of infectious droplets expelled by a carrier, the effectiveness of ventilation, the duration of exposure, and the virulence of the M. tuberculosis strain.[10] The chain of transmission can therefore be broken by isolating patients with active disease and starting effective anti-tuberculous therapy. After two weeks of such treatment, people with non-resistant active TB generally cease to be contagious.[20]

[Kralizec]

How very patronising.

W&F is absolutely right. Some strains of TBC are easily transmitted and if the story is true, these people pose a massive health risk especially since SA is rife with AIDS sufferers. I hope they catch the ones that haven't turned up yet

This little episode reminds me of that time when a British (or American?) lawyer with TBC boarded a plane back home because he thought that he would certainly die if he awaited treatment where he was, in Italy