jonnygoldstein.com

TB seems so romantic when it’s in the context of La Boheme (the 19th Century precursor to “Rent”). Well, it’s not so romantic when people you are socially connected to start dying from it, right here in the US of A. In the past month, two acquaintances of mine tested positive for TB. One just has the latent version, which is not transmisible and does not manifest symptoms; one had the active version and died. According to Wikipedia, around 2 billion people have the TB bacteria in their bodies. Luckily, only a tiny fraction of them develop active TB. TB is spread by coughing. It’s often treatable using a several month long heavy regimen of antibiotics, but there are drug resistant forms of the bacteria emerging. TB is a global problem. We can’t wall ourselves off from it. I hope that public health systems around the world can get the support they need to work on this nasty, nasty, disease.