Sunday, June 10, 2007
 Former ABC News producer John Rappaport breaks it down at nomorefakenews.com: "MAY 31, 2007. Can you believe this? Reuters is reporting that the man with the "highly dangerous form of TB," the newly wed, just happens to have a father-in-law who’s worked for years at the…Centers for Disease Control. In the Division of Tuberculosis.
H E L L O?
What are the odds?
[...]The father-in-law has given a statement to the press. He claims emphatically that’s he’s never had TB and the CDC TB lab has a very high level of security and germ containment.
Yeah. Sure...
As for the security of the lab, well, I’ve researched this kind of thing before. All sorts of labs leak germs like crazy. I don’t care what level of security they claim.
Maybe the flying TB man’s wife picked up the germ from her daddy and passed it to her husband.
This is entertainment at its best.
First man in 44 years to be quarantined by the US government for this kind of thing, and he just happens to have a father-in-law who works for the TB Division of the CDC.
But hey, just a remarkable coincidence. Let’s move on to some tidbits about Lindsay Lohan’s latest drug rehab stint.
All in all, things are working out remarkably well for the CDC. They've promoted the hell out of the idea that people can be detained and put into locked wards because of a germ. It's called operant conditioning.
[...]
MAY 30, 2007. The big scary health story now circling the media universe involves a man who flew to Europe from the US and then came back, all the while having a rare form of highly drug-resistant TB.
I comment on this story because, for years now, I've been analyzing the TESTS that are run to decide whether a person has a disease or not.
I've found these tests to be extremely unreliable. They are deceptive, in most instances, because they look for the wrong factors.
Many people can't deal with this. They are married to the premise that whatever diagnoses health agencies slap on people are accurate. When this assumption is questioned, their brains go into extreme vapor lock.
So let's start with a few snips from an AP article about the "flying TB case":Groom With TB Under Federal Quarantine
By Mike Stobbe - AP Medical Writer - 5-30-7
ATLANTA (AP) -- 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 passengers who sat near him on two trans-Atlantic flights…
[...]
"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 symptoms and didn't appear to be coughing," Gerberding said on ABC's "Good Morning America."
--- From the article, we discover that the man had no symptoms. The CDC also reports that the number of TB bacteria in the man’s body was low. What does this tell us?
The man wasn’t sick. He simply tested positive on a TB test. If it’s true that he has very few TB germs in his body, then there is no reason to suppose he’s going to get sick, because it takes a huge number of germs to cause illness.
Could he pass on a few TB germs to other people nearby? Of course. In fact, this happens every day, all over the world, not just on two specific plane flights. And people who are in good general health don’t fall ill. Their immune systems take care of the intruding germs.
So all the risk factors here are extremely low, and no different from hundreds of millions of similar situations worldwide.
Big deal.
Now, as to the tests: there are two standard types. The “skin test” and the QFT, which is also a kind of skin test. In both cases, a substance is injected under the skin of the patient. The substance contains specific proteins. These proteins are claimed to be two elements of the TB bacteria. In other words, the patient is receiving a kind of fake TB germ, in order to gauge the reaction of his immune system to it.
If the reaction is large enough---as seen by the size of the swelling on the skin---the patient is said to be positive for TB. The assumption is that the patient’s white blood cells are causing this swelling reaction.
What difference does this make? Why is this important?
Apparently, according to conventional wisdom, if the patient really has TB, his white cells are going to be more active, and in this active state, they will race to the site of the test-injection and battle the fake TB germ. This battle will extend the range of the visible swelling.
On the other hand, if the patient doesn’t have TB, his white blood cells will mount a lesser attack on the fake injected TB germ, and the swelling will be smaller.
But…who is to say that a patient who has TB is going to have the “white-cell power” to mount a more formidable attack on the fake TB germ? That patient’s immune system may already be compromised.
And a healthy patient’s white blood cells may be able to attack the fake TB germ with more vigor.
In short, the results of the test don’t really say whether a patient has TB or not.
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.....| Posted at 11:37 | PERMA-LINK |
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