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Woman with untreated TB finally in custody – held in “negative pressure” room
- oksurewhynot 3y agoLadies and gentlemen, we got her
- anovikov 3y agoOK now anti vaxxers no longer look too bad... That's the next level of crazy.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoThe woman's legal saga dates back to January 2022, when the health department resorted to court orders to try to get her to treat her deadly infection—or at least prevent her from readily spreading it in the community. A reminder of the oft overlooked social component of health issues.
- ProAm 3y ago[flagged]
- DoreenMichele 3y agoI'm a huge believer in your body, your choice. I'm also a huge believer in "Your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins."
- bunderbunder 3y agoNo, it doesn’t. That saying is such crap. Threatening people with bodily harm is not as bad as actually harming them, but it’s still both illegal and immoral. Swinging your fist at someone’s face but stopping just short of actually hitting them is generally also considered assault.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoI think most people don't interpret it that way. It's just shorthand for "You are free to do whatever you like -- until you start hurting other people, and then your freedom argument stops working."
- candiodari 3y agoThe fact that she refused all contact with authorities seems to indicate that part of the problem is how many fists have ended up in her face before this incident. I would like to point out that if the trend of authorities not being trusted (and frankly, of authorities behaving untrustworthy) doesn't reverse, the number of undetected cases will multiply to the point that force won't be an option.
- DoreenMichele 3y agoFrom what I gather, she's so sick that it's possible the infection is interfering with her thinking. Whatever her tragic backstory, history of trauma, instances of injustice, she's currently a threat to public health and I think most people will feel the authorities are in the right to detain her at this point.
- smt88 3y agoIt is her body and her choice until it infringes on other people's bodies and choices. The people she's exposing to TB have no way to choose to avoid her. She's forcing a dangerous illness on them without their knowledge or consent. She was given a choice to stay at home and she decided to go out and endanger others instead.
- foxyv 3y agoJust because your foot is a part of your body, doesn't mean you get to kick people. If she wants to have untreated TB voluntarily, she should take reasonable precautions to not infect others.
- rocqua 3y agoThis says nothing about her stated reasons for not wanting treatment. Is it anti-vax, is it a dislike of medicine, (paranoid) disbelief of the diagnosis, religiously motivated, or something else? I am glad she is caught, but wondering why this happened at all.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tash9 3y agoI wondered too, until I read the part about her being from Tacoma
- coolsunglasses 3y agoNot being from Washington myself, which is it?
- irrational 3y agoTacoma is the Gary, Indiana of Washington.
- 0cVlTeIATBs 3y agoSomething about being lower class? I note an article mentioned her needing interpretation services, is her being non-English speaking part of it?
- rootusrootus 3y agoTacoma is just north of a big military base, which probably accounts for some of it. As much as I loved my time in the military, it was pretty noticeable that the neighborhoods surrounding military bases tend to be rough.
- arpyzo 3y agoTacoma has/is going through quite a renaissance and has become IMHO a pretty nice place to live.
- tehf0x 3y agoA modern day Typhoid Mary! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon
- jxramos 3y agoexactly, I wonder if they were able to likewise trace individuals caught in her crossfire.
- _nalply 3y agoNo. The woman will probably die from tuberculosis. Staff (not staph) at the hospital first thought she has severe lung cancer. It's not a nice death.
- anamexis 3y agoThat doesn't invalidate the comparison to Typhoid Mary...
- Sohcahtoa82 3y agoHow does any of what you said relate to her being (or not being) a modern Typhoid Mary?
- axus 3y agoTyphoid Mary did not have many symptoms and did not die of typhoid. This woman might be ignoring her condition but it is obvious to others. There's definitely room for comparison, and also contrast.
- senkora 3y agoTyphoid Mary was famously an asymptomatic reservoir, so she was able to survive and spread the disease for many years. This woman… probably not.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 3y ago
- Laaas 3y agoReminds me of (Typhoid) Mary Mallon [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon
- JackFr 3y agoTyphoid Mary was an interesting case because she was completely asymptomatic, and so she claimed not believe she had it. This women seems to have full on TB.
- sidewndr46 3y agoMary did not claim to believe she did not have an infection. That's a very odd twisting of the English language. She did not believe she had the infection, full stop. It's also worth mentioning that complying with the law at the time meant she was unable to earn any income, so her options were basically to break the law or be in an institution. Given the history of US institutions I think most of us would have made the same choice.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoShe had been isolated on a quarantine island (near Ellis?) in a cabin. She was a highly social person and was going stir-crazy. So she escaped. Not so much an issue about Mary as it was her treatment. That treatment could not end well. But back then there was very little money to deal with such cases.
- fluoridation 3y agoWell, "she claimed she did not believe she had an infection" is more correct, since we don't know what she believed, only what she claimed. It's possible she did believe she was infected and used incredulity as an excuse to continue spreading it.
- bombcar 3y agoI read this as "untreated terabyte" and was horribly confused for a moment.
- jxramos 3y agosounds like a scary source of harddrive corruption that left untreated will corrupt the whole platter/flash/etc material.
- ajot 3y agoSame happened to me. Apparently TB stands for tuberculosis, is that common knowledge?
- dontwearitout 3y agoFor anyone in the healthcare sphere rather than tech, yes
- Jtsummers 3y agoOr anyone who's ever worked in the food (and adjacent) industry and gone to the health department for a TB test. It's pretty commonly referred to as TB across the US.
- JdeBP 3y agoAnd for people in tech industries, too. I knew "TB" as tuberculosis, from "TB jabs", long before I had ever heard of a terabyte.
- hellotomyrars 3y agoYes. Obviously people here see TB in the context of a Terabyte constantly instead but TB is normal nomenclature for Tuberculosis. For example nobody ever says “Tuberculosis skin test” they say “TB skin test”’
- tekla 3y agoYesl For literally most people considering its one of the most virulent diseases in human history. To not know would be a indication of incredible lack of knowledge of the history medicine and science.
- michaelmrose 3y agoWe allowed her to run around spreading for another year and a half and captured her...at her house. They could have had one officer hang out outside her house while she was at the casino–or you know at the bus stop where she gets off on her way back from the casino–and quietly pick up her 18 months ago.
- bluGill 3y agoIt is intentionally hard to get all the details in place to pick someone up. Having someone pick her up is easy, there are many police officers who can do it (though most wouldn't know how to use the right protection to deal with someone with TB). However having a process in place to ensure that someone like that is picked up quickly, while not allowing evil people to abuse the process to pick on an innocent person is very hard.
- michaelmrose 3y agoThat process is a judge and a court order, the ability to appeal such an order, and the due process surrounding and 90 days is a sane time frame to complete the task from refusal to treat to being picked up. It took longer than that just for them to send a cop out to pick her up after an arrest warrant was already issued after that due process had already run during which there were surely countless deputies cruising around or parked strategically to issue speeding tickets. You are making excuses. There isn't any. Our government is just bad at a lot of what it does. Lazy and laggardly execution or processing of orders doesn't increase due process.
- 0zemp2c 3y ago[dead]
- lettergram 3y agoI have a massive issue with restraining people who have committed no crimes. Just in way of an example, what evidence do we have that she committed a crime (outside of avoiding treatment, and then avoiding imo illegal detention)? As far as I see it’s been 2-3 years she’s been out in public, likely longer with TB. Do we have any evidence it spread to others? I’m highly skeptical of the science around TB because of cases like this. We have laws that let people commit suicide, we sell alcohol (a known toxin), and why do we care if someone’s sick and doesn’t want treatment? To put another way, I like to the think of the government as “we the people”. Would I be willing to restrain someone at gun point for being sick? Nah, that’s crazy.
- arcbyte 3y agoNobody cares if she runs off to a national forest and disappears in the wild where she can't be around others to spread infection. But to be around other people, knowing or should knowing that she is causing a high probability of harm to others IS a crime.
- lettergram 3y agoSuch a high probability that in 2-3+ years there’s zero evidence she spread TB. There’s a reason TB isn’t an issue any more… we have dramatically improved health, smoke dramatically less AND have effective antibiotics. TB kills how many people in the US? Oh right… less than strep, do we lock up people with strep? Of course not. 13 million people today in the US have latent TB. Effectively, their body fought it odd and isolated the bacteria. We don’t lock them up. What evidence do we have that this person has an active case AFTER 2-3 years? https://www.statista.com/statistics/661344/tuberculosis-deaths-in-the-us-since-1960/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/661344/tuberculosis-deat... https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/tuberculosis/symptoms-causes/syc-20351250 https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/tuberculosis/... https://www.cdc.gov/tb/publications/factsheets/general/tb.htm https://www.cdc.gov/tb/publications/factsheets/general/tb.ht...
- anoonmoose 3y ago
- PragmaticPulp 3y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34686029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34686029 This saga has been going on for a long, long time. At one point she was even caught going to a casino to gamble: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/04/woman-with-untreated-tb-is-on-the-lam-took-city-bus-to-casino/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/04/woman-with-untreated... She also had a hospital visit because she was a passenger in a car (therefore not isolating) and she avoided disclosing her active Tuberculosis infection to the staff. They had to take chest X-rays as part of her accident-related treatment and the infection was so bad that they initially thought it was severe lung cancer. (Described in the linked HN article) Given the public health risk and her continued flaunting of the isolation/treatment requirement, I'm surprised this went on for so long. We'll never know how many other people were exposed, from casinos to other hospital patients and everyone else she passed along the way without exercising even basic precautions. Wild.
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago*staff. I doubt staphylococcus would care about tuberculosis :)
- xref 3y ago> she avoided disclosing her active Tuberculosis infection to the staph I feel like this is the punchline to a great doctor joke but just needs a setup
- PragmaticPulp 3y agoOne of my better typos, to be honest. Thanks for catching. I edited it out.
- rootusrootus 3y agoIt makes me happy to see other people make rhyming typos. I do it all the time, and wonder if I'm going senile. Maybe we're all headed that way on the same boat, but at least I'm not alone.
- luxuryballs 3y agoI wonder how long she would have continued living for? This is a terrible situation to find yourself in I’m sure. I wonder how many people are out there in the same situation but flying under the radar!
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agoKind of bizarre to make this big of a case over one woman. TB is possibly the most widespread infectious disease in the world. It's the leading cause of death from infectious disease after COVID-19. One quarter of the world's population has a latent TB infection. An active TB infection is basically less dangerous to the general public than a person with active COVID-19. In both cases, elderly and immunocompromised people are the most at risk, and there are vaccines for both, though we stopped giving kids the TB vaccine in the west. But a person with active TB will usually infect only about 10-15 people in their lifetime, whereas COVID-19 is much more infectious.
- nerdchum 3y agoAntibiotic resistant tuberculosis is pretty terrifying though. One untreatable TB infection causes 15 new ones and those 15 new ones cause 15 new ones each? In a pandemic population size macro sense that's huge and exponential.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y ago15 people in their lifetime. COVID is spread much faster because it's more contagious.
- estebank 3y agoTB kills fewer people than COVID-19 because most people have had COVID-19 but only a small portion of the population has had untreated TB.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agoI didn't mean "in the USA", I meant globally. Many countries have over 90% of the population infected with TB. In the USA it's 33.4 million people infected with TB.
- estebank 3y agoYes, and in those countries TB is one the leading causes of death![1] In 2021, there were 10.6 million people infected, and 1.6 million died from it.[2] [1]: https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/tuberculosis/by-country/ https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/tuberculo... [2]: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tuberculosis https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tuberculosi...
- go_prodev 3y agoAs a non American, I wonder if she refused treatment because of the cost? The article didn't mention the options they gave her.
- insanitybit 3y agoShe's mentally ill.
- 1MachineElf 3y agoI'd say this is the most likely reason. Mental illness, especially dementia, is a widespread problem that US society cannot address due to so much emphasis on individual liberty. Our current and previous presidents are fine examples of how far someone can go when the balance of power is tilted towards enablers. I wouldn't want to advocate for restricting someone's rights, but the widespread negative impacts of someone's personal choices are why our legislation is increasingly following utilitarianism philosophy. This cultural difference is why groups like the WHO and the UN are being relied upon to side-step the free-for-all/free-fall that is the USA.
- LargeWu 3y agoOn top of that, there is, perhaps not surprisingly, not a good track record of mentally incompetent people being treated well once forcibly institutionalized. Physical, emotional, and sexual abuse by other patients and staff, neglect, deplorable conditions, etc. I think there is definitely a need for a solution for those who are truly unable to survive in civil society, but the state has not historically been good at implementing that.
- jdminhbg 3y agoNo, that is not how it works here.
- nerdchum 3y agoIt's not?
- anigbrowl 3y agoLooking forward to the announcement of her presidential run.
- ncr100 3y agoLikely, given recent history of the conservative party.