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ADVANCE Outlook: Lab Professionals

Taking Responsibility

Published November 29, 2007 9:50 AM by Amanda Koehler
The CDC recently announced none of the airplane passengers who flew with TB-infected lawyer Andrew Speaker have contracted the disease.

This should be a sigh of relief, knowing the 250 people who boarded a flight from Atlanta to Paris in May are safe from the disease.

However, it is still infuriating to know Speaker, who was advised by health officials not to fly to Europe for his wedding because of his condition, went against what educated professionals told him.

People must be responsible for their own health and illness diagnoses, especially when it comes to something that can be easily spread to others. If you can avoid potentially passing diseases on to others, you should. This seems like an obvious statement, but it's one Speaker did not seem to understand. He selfishly put lives at risk when he decided to put his own needs before the health of people around him.

1 comments

Be afraid. I attended a weeklong workshop/lecture series at the A.G.Holley Sanatorium in West Palm Beach with people who's skills ranged from public health nurses to pulmonologists. I also had the priviledge of working in the county public health lab which was adjacent to the sanatorium. The official take home message from the week  of lectures were;1) don't test for TB if you believe that the patients will not complete the drug regimine&2) the PPD can generate up to 20% false positives & 20% false negatives. What I learned at the west palm lab at BSL-3 was great but when I described the standard KOH sputum digest/ AFB slide techniques which I had been shown in two  other facilities which work at BSL-2 I was told these were essentially worthless.MMWR indicated that most of new cases were non-american born hispanics, and public health officals are not aggressively surveiling them.Better yet, the rates of XMDR are escalating in China and Africa where yet again surveillance efforts are almost non existent. Things are going to get much worse as long as public health takes a back seat to politics with regard to management of immigrants. we are not ready XMDR.

Peter Forbes, generalist - med Tech January 21, 2008 5:02 PM
SC

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