Yes. The question is how did it balloon so quickly if these people were identified an receiving treatment? Is this a breakdown in the case monitoring among Kansas City medical community or something else?
The original cases were in low income people who had been born outside the US but whose children were born in the US according to the paper.
Baffles me that someone would write something so definitively yet not expand on it in any way at all.
Not saying you're wrong (I have no idea), but what a low-effort comment. I'm curious, you seem (or claim, at least) to know something, can you help me satisfy my curiosity?
> The outbreak involved 13 people across four households in Kansas City and spanned 1 year. While a majority of the seven adults identified were born outside the U.S. in a country that had experienced a multidrug-resistant TB outbreak with the same genotype in 2007-2009, most of the six children were U.S.-born, noted Elizabeth Groenweghe, MPH, of the Unified Government Public Health Department in Kansas City, and colleagues in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
So it's either been a latent infection in someone in the first household or they traveled to their home country and brought it back, or something.. it's likely the local health department knows the exact lineage and route it took but they avoid publishing the full details for obvious reasons in this climate.
What are the “obvious reasons?” It seems to me the obvious reasons are that the claim is that illegal immigration has been blamed for outbreaks of diseases that are relatively uncommon in the U.S. and publishing the full details would provide evidence supporting that claim.
But if that is what happened, then why not publish those details? If that isn’t what happened, then why not publish those details? Facts are always preferred to conjuncture.
Because random people on the internet deciding to target a random family suffering from a serious illness won't remotely help anything. Regardless of the immigration status of the family, they'll be targeted as if they were illegal (even though their kids were explicitly born in the US and are obviously Americans) and the vitriol will ensure their community is less safe.. the ensuing media freakout will make sure that other infected communities are much less likely to turn up to hospitals when they have communal infections, almost guaranteeing the next outbreak will spread further.
Remember the "illegal haitians are eating our cats" bullshit from last summer? When they absolutely weren't and they were all legal refugees anyway? Then the future President weighed in and said the US should deport them anyway?
TB is particularly tough to track; it has an incubation period that can range into "years" and most people never develop symptoms. Add in getting quarantined for months and you've got a problem on the seeking treatment side of things, too.
