We're back: How tuberculosis is set to surge globally once again

https://thebulletin.org/2025/03/were-back-how-tuberculosis-is-set-to-surge-globally-once-again/

by pseudolus • 1 year ago

82 30 1 year ago

superkuh• 1 year ago

Bruce Sterling's "Heavy Weather" was a surprisingly accurate prediction of the 2020-2040s for coming out in 1995 at the peak of "the end of history". He called this one re: tuberculosis.

sepositus5• 1 year ago

This was an enlightening article (as I wasn't too familiar with the history of TB), but I'm struggling to grasp the overall point. If USAID is all that's standing between us and TB taking over the world, that's a _seriously_ lousy place to be in. Why are we not spending time talking about resolving that issue instead? You could argue that restoring USAID gives us more time to resolve the issue, but then I would ask what has been happening during the time the funding was active?

Maybe I misunderstood the author's assertion.

staticautomatic• 1 year ago

It’s systemically really hard to treat TB in places without a lot of health infrastructure. USAID can mitigate this but it doesn’t follow that “more USAID” can eradicate TB.

tekla2• 1 year ago

Current TB vaccines and treatments are not incredibly effective against it. The effort is toward not letting it get so much worse than it already is by aggressively fighting it with the mediocre tools we have.

freen5• 1 year ago

The answer to the problem of the US’s work as only mitigating, rather than solving is not abandonment: it is true leadership and collaboration.

Smallpox, the hole in the ozone layer, etc.

It is possible.

Shrinking away because you can’t fully solve it alone or others aren’t helping as much as you’d like?

Cowardice and/or avarice to a degree that is, in my humble opinion, indistinguishable from evil.

sepositus5• 1 year ago

it is true leadership and collaboration

This is a great outlook, but I think it's slightly short-sighted if you don't consider that there are several ways to achieve the same outcome outside of USAID. I think the US can lead the world through public example rather than trying to set that same example through the government.

For example, I treat my charitable donations with the same seriousness that I apply towards my 401k. I am researching organizations, determining their overall efficacy, and splitting my funds to where I think they would be the most beneficial, given the current global climate.

I would love to see this principle applied more broadly to the public. There might be services out there that already provide such "charity portfolios," but I'll admit that I'm pretty content doing it myself, so I haven't looked much. But, given our government's history of mismanagement, I think this sort of approach would have far more impact than funneling everything through a large organization like USAID.

afpx2• 1 year ago

A lot of Americans like to help (clearly we do since we funded it for so many years). But, a lot of Americans also believe it's not the government's job to do those things. It's not necessarily 'cowardice / avarice' - just principles. But, if someone set up the NGO and opened it to donations, I'm sure a lot of Americans would support it.

ZeroGravitas• 1 year ago

I'm not sure th article had a singular point, it was more like a book review with some topical references.

The author of the book suggested in a YouTube video (based on his contacts in the medical teams) that the sudden and unexpected cut of USAID funds led to people half way through TB treatment being abandoned which is entirely unnecessary even if you strongly politically believe that the US should not be doing this and increases the risk of new strains mutating.

hamaluik2• 1 year ago

Everything is Tuberculosis [1] answers just that. Essentially it boils down to staggering wealth inequality and the aftershocks of colonialism . The west “cured” TB 70 years ago then stopped caring about it. There isn’t a enough profit in preventing a million deaths a year in the rest of the world, so we just.. don’t.

[1] https://everythingistb.com/

tekla2• 1 year ago

Oh yes, the billions of dollars and decades of work specifically for the 3rd world to fight TB never happened and the cash was burned in a big bonfire.

sepositus5• 1 year ago

The premise sounds interesting, but it seems a bit reductionist if it boils down to that, no? Is the book looking at it through the lens of government actions or private charities? I'm not aware of any evidence that suggests charities simply stopped operating because of capitalism.

OutOfHere• 1 year ago

People can have latent TB, which causes no symptoms and is not contagious. If it reactivates, it can cause permanent damage to the lungs and/or other areas such as the bones, joints, kidneys, and brain. Diagnosis and treatment are important just the same. Lazy doctors can miss out on testing for TB when the lungs appear clear, with symptoms present in just the lymph nodes, bones, joints, kidneys, or brain, indicating possible extrapulmonary TB.

jmclnx• 1 year ago

Well Trump does not care about the WHO and what is says, didn't he force the US to leave the WHO.

And yes, his cuts will ensure TB and many other once close to extent diseases come back. Just look at measles in the South.

inglor_cz2• 1 year ago

Poorer countries and generally countries with worse governance have a real trouble controlling tuberculosis. Given how much of it is asymptomatic, you have to have a real screening program including X-rays in order to catch cases, and that is beyond the ability of most developing countries - which are precisely the countries where most of the population boom is taking place.

I don't believe that USAID can cover, say, the whole of Africa with preventative care. The US cannot cover even all of its own citizens, for a host of reasons, much less 1,5 billion people in exotic regions far from its borders.

Purge of USAID is likely to make the situation worse, but only marginally worse. The real problem is that at least third of humanity doesn't yet have any reasonable healthcare infrastructure, reliable grid (for medical machines to work), public safety (for doctors to survive), etc., etc., etc. If we had a functional recipe to solve such problems, they would likely be solved already.

leoh2• 1 year ago

Purge of USAID is likely to make the situation worse, but only marginally worse

Do you have a degree in public health?

inglor_cz2• 1 year ago

What?

About a quarter of the entire humanity is infected with TBC bacteria. Two billion people, often in the most remote and poorest places in the world, like Niger or Afghanistan.

You don't have to be a public health professional to calculate that USAID can put a dent to this massive problem, but cannot even dream about reducing it to, say, half of its current size.

os2warpman• 1 year ago

The US cannot cover even all of its own citizens,

The US already spends enough on healthcare to provide gold-standard best-in-the-world coverage to all of its citizens.

It could take any random system better than the one extant in the United States, CTRL-F the country's names in all of the rules and regulations for that system and change it to "The United States", implement that system, and have enough money left over to cure poverty, hunger, and homelessness for $0.00 in extra spending.

We choose not to.

There is too much money to be made so a constant campaign of disinformation and vilification is waged to stop that from happening.

Gibbon1• 1 year ago

My theory is any system you pick would work if it was run with good faith. The problem with the US system is the financial oligarchy that runs the US sees bad faith as a feature.

JeremyStinson• 1 year ago

"Even after treatments emerged to combat TB, their geographic availability revealed the prevalence of prejudice. Starting in the 1980s, the emergence of HIV/AIDS *allowed TB to spread more quickly through weakened immune systems*"

This is the statement that stood out to me. We've had 5 years of weakening immune systems, which has, with a high probability, contributed further to the spread of TB. History is repeating, again.

We're back: How tuberculosis is set to surge globally once again

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