Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is America's largest recorded since the 1950s (opens in new tab)

This is true beyond just vaccines. All too often hardships are forgotten, history is just old pictures and stories, and people who are too far disconnected from those real events and don't learn from history will just walk the same path, leading to the same hardships.

They all think that the world is better today so they're smarter or better than the old generations, that the world evolved so they're intrinsically prepared, so the pains of the past can't harm them. Ironically they're ignoring all the lessons and the tools that made the world better and are needed to keep it like that, and instead think things are better because they just are.

They'll skip any vaccines or support extremist regimes because they think the modern world is just immune to this, it's intrinsically and permanently "fixed". We have freedoms or don't get sick because we "just" have freedoms and don't get sick.

Having close family spending a lifetime paralyzed by the polio virus before a vaccine was widely available, or spending some of my life in the cold embrace of dictatorship really drove the point home for me about learning the lessons of history.

The safety record of the BCG vaccine, in terms of permanent harm, is pretty good. But a normal side effect is "The usual expected reaction to BCG vaccination is redness and/or a small lump at the injection site, followed by a small ulcer (open sore) a few weeks later (usually less than 1 cm in diameter). The ulcer may last from a few weeks to months before healing to a small flat scar."[2] Mass vaccination will have parents screaming "my perfect baby has an open sore from the vaccine" on Instagram, with pictures.

The classic live-virus smallpox vaccine has similar side effects, by the way, plus a death rate of 1-2 per million.

Huge political problem. Remember all the screaming about the COVID vaccines, which are pure RNA, can't replicate, and have fewer side effects.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3349743/#s6

[2] https://www.rch.org.au/uploadedFiles/Main/Content/immunisati...

There's an old Dutch fort in Ghana with a graveyard. Prior to modern medicine white people dropped like flies in Africa.

What’s a heinous tragedy in one could be an existential threat in the other.

Edit: actually let's put the 1950s up there instead. I think there's more information that way.

When we say "recorded history" we don't mean "the window of time in which we have detailed records up to our modern standards", we specifically mean "the window of time in which we have records of any sort", contrasted with "prehistory".

The phrase they were looking for is "largest on record" or even better "largest since 195X".

> For broader world history, recorded history begins with the accounts of the ancient world around the 4th millennium BCE, and it coincides with the invention of writing.

EDIT: Downvote away, but I'd be interested to hear from someone who believes that "recorded history" is not incorrect and confusing usage here, with an explanation rather than a drive by vote.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorded_history

I have long suspected this as part of why the subject isn't much discussed, despite being more prevalent than most realize.

The elephant here is (aside from latent infection) the atypically long duration of treatment, which can exceed 6 months and is harsh. Many, even otherwise responsible people, will founder before the proper end of treatment and this, I think, is what terrifies health professionals - so much, that it almost seems to be avoided.

It's probably time we start looking a bit harder for "natural" or alternate treatments. Some in medical journals, are under scrutiny, but inconclusive.

Edit: I also think we'll be finding more about latent infections being involved in an array of other ailments, especially when mixed with the ultra prevalent EBV. And EBV is involved in a lot.

You have to be a little suspicious of some of this — folks are looking for political reasons for scary disease outbreaks.

This is going to be a crazy four years, if it’s only four.

Poor countries and communities cannot afford the options on the market. TB wont be solved until we put people before profit.

pretty sure the ideology is to remove every social safety net and service to "prove" government doesn't work and then the robber barons can swoop in and make it a paid service... and make it so the capital class gets to make and save more money as they can afford to buy any of those services that were cut. it's basically vulture economics but at the nation scale. it's not great.

We have good reason to believe it'd show up here given that Kansas's TB situation has had multiple bulletins over the years

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7235a4.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/ss/ss7304a1.htm

Ofc, one may conclude anything one wants,

It's been a big story since the 1980s, IIRC. I remember in college in the 1990s a biologist friend explaining that TB was the greatest disease threat to public health and it was being completely ignored.

Frankly, it's hard to get worked up about it. Notwithstanding that it is a serious public health threat, there's a strong political rhetoric aspect to the discussion, both in the popular and professional spheres. It's unfortunate. In the 1980s and 1990s it was all about how Reagan decimated our public health infrastructure. The arguments aren't per se wrong, but it's difficult to gauge relevance and prioritization about the threat of TB given how part of the medical and scientific community seem to have been border-line crying wolf for 40 years. Discussion centers around absolute numbers. Tell me what the per capita relationship looks like, especially per capita among the populations most vulnerable to acquisition and disease, and what the long-term trends look like. I see this in a lot of other adjacent public health discussions tainted by political hand wringing, such as food insecurity, etc--lots of absolute numbers. But global populations are growing. The US, for example, grew by 80 million people, or 30%, between 1990 and 2020. That's not to deny that tuberculosis is a growing problem, but we have many problems. And the constant drum beat of alarm causes some parts of the community to (increasingly) react in counterproductive ways. From an individual moral standpoint, that's on them, but from an epidemiological and sociological perspective, maybe the professionals bear a little blame, too, at least in terms of communication. We could all do better.

I think this + bad luck, really.

Eggs more expensive doesn't matter any more.

- SARSv2 (aka Covid-19) happened after Trump disbanded the team that contained SARSv1.

- During COVID, the west suspended polio vaccination programs in developing regions, so now polio outbreaks are a thing again.

- Antivaxxers in NYC caused a massive measles outbreak a few years ago.

Etc, etc.

His views most certainly aren’t what a majority of people want, and he doesn’t try to expand by doing things the majority want. If anything he paints those not completely in his camp, which is the vast majority of Americans, as an enemy.

Maybe in countries with multiple parties, proportional representation (or the like), and mechanisms to encourage voting like a holiday for elections.

But, everywhere else? It's a crapshoot..low turnout also doesn't help.

TIL Most voters don't have well defined policy preferences. Nor can they correctly associate political parties with their stated policy positions.

That doesn't mean they don't want services, that means that in addition to 74 million that voted against trump, 90 million more also didn't want him.