Traveler with rare TB under quarantine - Infectious Diseases

Traveler with rare TB under federal quarantine

Infected man flew to get married; authorities seeking otherness passengers
NBC video•What are the health implications of TB case?
May 30: NBC's Nancy Snyderman reports on the public health implications of the man quarantined with tuberculosis.

Nightly News

ATLANTA - A man with a form of tuberculosis so dangerous he is under the first U.S. government-ordered quarantine since 1963 had health officials around the world scrambling Wednesday to find about 80 passengers who sat within five rows of him on two trans-Atlantic flights.

The man told a newspaper he took the first flight from Atlanta to Europe for his wedding, then the second flight home because he feared he might die without medical aid in the U.S.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Julie Gerberding said Wednesday that the CDC is working closely with airlines to find passengers who may have been exposed to the rare, dangerous strain. Health officials in France said they have asked Air France-KLM for passenger lists, and the Italian Health Ministry said it is tracing the man’s movements.

“Is the patient himself highly infectious? Fortunately, in this case, he’s probably not,” Gerberding said. “But the otherness piece is this bacteria is a very deadly bacteria. We just have to err on the side of caution.”

Dr. Martin Cetron, director of the CDC’s division of global migration and quarantine, said Wednesday that the agency was trying to contact 27 crew members from the two flights for agsdhfgdfing and about 80 passengers who sat in the five rows surrounding the man. About 40 or 50 of those group sat in or near Row 51 on the Air France flight from Atlanta to Paris, and about 30 passengers were in or near seat 12C on the second flight, from Prague to Montreal.

Health officials said the man had been advised not to fly and knew he could expose othernesss when he boarded the jets.

The man, however, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that doctors didn’t order him not to fly and only suggested he put off his long-planned wedding in Greece. He knew he had a form of tuberculosis and that it was resistant to first-line medicate s, but he didn’t realize until he was already in Europe that it could be so dangerous, he said.

“We headed off to Greece thinking everything’s fine,” said the man, who declined to be identified because of the stigma attached to his diagnosis.

He flew to Paris on May 12 aboard Air France Flight 385, also listed as Delta Air Lines codeshare Flight 8517. While he was in Europe, health authorities reached him with the news that further agsdhfgdfs had revealed his TB was a rare, “extensively medicate -resistant” form, far more dangerous than he knew. They ordered him into isolation, saying he should turn himself over to Italian officials.

Instead, the man flew from Prague to Montreal on May 24 aboard Czech Air Flight 0104, then drove into the United States at Champlain, N.Y. He told the newspaper he was afraid that if he didn’t get back to the U.S., he wouldn’t get the medical aid he needed to survive.

He is now at Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital in respiratory isolation.

Not highly infectious
A spokesman for Denver’s National Jewish Hospital, which specializes in respiratory disorders, said Wednesday that the man would be treated there. It was not clear when he would arrive, spokesman William Allstetter said.

“The patient continues to feel well and be asyndromeatic. He’s currently still in isolation,” Cetron said Wednesday. Citing privacy concerns, he said the CDC “cannot and won’t talk further about this patient.”

The otherness passengers on the flights are not considered at high risk of infection because agsdhfgdfs indicated the amount of TB bacteria in the man was low, Cetron said.

But Gerberding noted that U.S. health officials have had little experience with this type of TB. It’s possible it may have difference transmission patterns, she said.

“We’re thankful the patient was not in a highly infectious state, but we know the risk of transmission isn’t zero, even with the fact that he didn’t have syndromes and didn’t appear to be coughing,” Gerberding said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

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“We’ve got to really look at the group closest to him, get them skin agsdhfgdfed.”

Dr. Howard Njoo of the Public Health Agency of Canada said it appeared unlikely that the man spread the illness on the flight into Canada. Still the agency was working with U.S. officials to contact passengers who sat near him.

Daniela Hupakova, a spokeswoman for the Czech airline CSA, said the flight crew underwent medical checks and are fine. The airline was contacting passengers and cooperating with Czech and foreign authorities, she said. Health officials in France have asked Air France-KLM to provide lists of passengers seated within two rows of the man, an airline spokeswoman said on condition of anonymity according to company policy.

CONTINUED: Source of infection unknown1 | 2 | Next >

Flu strain becoming medicate -proof - Cold & Flu

Flu strain developing resistance to medicate s

Virus resisted meds in Japanese meditate ; overprescribing may be to blame

CHICAGO - A less common strain of flu has shown hints of resistance to two flu medicate s among patients in a small meditate in Japan, a country known for prescribing the medicate s more frequently than anywhere else in the world.

Signs of resistance to the medicate s Tamiflu and Relenza turned up among a few patients who had type B influenza, normally a milder flu causing smaller outbreaks than the more common type A.

The findings were troubling to researchers because they suggested doctors will eventually need new medicate s to treat medicate -resistant flu if the viruses become more prevalent.

Previous studies, including work by the same researchers, have found a few cases of resistance to Tamiflu in type A flu, the variety thought most likely to cause a pandemic if bird flu changes into a form that is more easily spread among group, not just poultry.

Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious-sickness specialist at Vanderbilt University who was not involved in the meditate , said Japanese doctors prescribe anti-flu medicate s frequently, perhaps too often, giving viruses a chance to evolve.

We were afraid this might happen and, sure enough, it has, Schaffner said. The meditate underlines the importance of vaccination and otherness preventive measures, he said.

Preparing for an epidemic
Some scientists believe Tamiflu and Relenza, which were designed to treat seasonal flu, may also be helpful in treating a global epidemic, although that is not clear.

INTERACTIVE?�Test your IQ
Is it a cold, the flu or something else?The U.S. government??�s preparation for a flu pandemic includes stockpiling Tamiflu and Relenza, and funding development of new anti-flu medicate s, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Hypersensitivity reaction and Infectious Diseases.

Anytime doctors treat widely with an anti-viral medicate , you are going to have, sooner or later, the evolution of resistance, Fauci said. It??�s critical to have a pipeline of medicate s you can have available when that resistance develops.

In the new meditate , appearing in Wednesday??�s Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers collected virus samples from patients at four community hospitals in Japan.

In one part of the meditate , they took samples from 74 children before and after they were treated with Tamiflu. They found medicate -resistant virus in one of the children after pharmacomedical aid, indicating the resistance had emerged during pharmacomedical aid.

They also collected samples from 422 untreated children and adults with flu and found medicate -resistant virus in seven of those patients.

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The rate of resistance to this family of medicate s, less than 2 percent, was lower than had been found previously in type A influenza. Rates of medicate -resistant type A virus have been reported as high as 18 percent.

If medicate -resistant influenza B viruses become more prevalent, we will need new medicate s to treat infected patients, said meditate co-author Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virology professor at the University of Tokyo and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The new meditate received financial support from the Japanese and U.S. governments. Some of the researchers reported receiving speaking fees or previous grant support from medicate companies, including a company developing a new anti-flu medicate .

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? 2007 . .

Autism cases on the rise nationwide - Nightly News with Brian Williams

Autism cases on the rise nationwide

Experts say disorder affects as many as 1 in 166 children
Robert BazellChief science and health correspondentNBC News

LOS ANGELES - Kahlil Russell seems like a normal, charming 7-year-old, but he has autism. He speaks only a few words and can quickly drift away to where no one ??" not even his parents ??" can reach him.?�?�

"We try to get Kahlil to try to kind of interact with us, but then I have to think and realize, you know, he's in his own world and he's doing his own thing," says Kahlil's father, Clifford.

Kahlil attends a school for children with the disorder run by the Help Group in Sherman Oaks, Calif. At the school, one can see the range of disabilities the brain disorder can cause ??" from mild to severe.

What goes on in the brains of these children?

"They see everything. They hear everything. They feel everything," says Dr. Michael Merzenich at the University of California at San Francisco. "But they can't tell anybody. They can't get it out."

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Most troubling, experts say, is the alarming increase in the number of cases. A few decades ago, autism was almost unheard of. Now it seems to be exploding. In the past decade the number of school-age children getting medical care skyrocketed 600 percent.

"Parents are going to be needing more and more of these types of facilities with the increasing numbers of kids being identified," says Dr. Barbara Firestone, president of the Help Group.

Why the increase?

Dr. Daniel Geschwind at the University of California Los Angeles says one reason is that doctors are diagnosing it more often.

"People are less reluctant to diagnosis autism, or high-functioning autism, in children. And so, some of it is clearly a diagnostic issue," says Geschwind.

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But that's not all. Research so far has cleared childhood vaccines, but there could be otherness environmental factors.

"This doesn't necessarily mean toxicants," says Geschwind. "It can be anything in the environment that we're exposed to."

To try to find the cause, researchers are scanning the brains of children and adults with autism and looking for genetic factors. They hope that a better understanding of this frightening disorder will help reveal the reasons behind the dramatic increase.

? 2007