TB for all

One of our patients was just diagnosed with tuberculosis.

It's not a big deal, except that TB is a serious public health concern. Since this disease is essentially non-existent in most industrialized countries (we see it because there is a large immigrant and Mexican population at our hospital), public health officials want to ensure that all TB patients are being actively treated. In an effort to further minimize its spread to others, they also try to make sure people in close proximity to the patient are protected from the disease.

Specifically this means that when a patient with TB is discharged home, they will be visited weekly by nurses who force them to take their medications, and the patient's family will have to take TB medications too.

So when we were ready to discharge home our patient, we had the TB Control people get in touch with her family to get them involved with the plan ... only to find out the entire family already has TB!

It doesn't get easier than that! That's certainly one way to avoid dealing with the TB Control people. And what do you know ... a county patient made things easy for once!