Health Spectator

You may remember the case of Andrew Speaker. He went to Italy to be married and returned with a drug-resistant form of tuberculosis that caused a national furor and was reported on this website. The furor arose because Speaker traveled by plane with a highly contagious, hard-to-cure disease. At one point, Speaker was diagnosed by the CDC as having “extensively drug resistant tuberculosis.” That diagnosis was later downgraded to “multi-drug resistant tuberculosis.” Even so, Speaker was faced with a two-year regimen of drugs or surgery. He chose the surgery and recuperated, we are happy to report, without further complications.

While Speaker’s case became an instant sensation, the CDC and other public health officials managed to keep quiet a much more insidious form of the disease that appeared on our shores just a few months later, around September 2007. A 19-year-old student named Oswaldo Juarez came to the U.S. from Peru to study English. When he found himself coughing up blood, he knew something was very wrong.

He was diagnosed as having “extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis”—two cuts above the variety that Speaker had. After three months of futile treatment by a local hospital in Fort Lauderdale, he found himself living at the A.G. Holley State Hospital, the nation’s last tuberculosis sanitarium, located just south of West Palm Beach.

After approximately a two-year regimen not unlike chemotherapy for cancer, Juarez was pronounced cured and allowed to leave the facility. That was in July of this year. After 19 months of treatment at A.G. Holley, Juarez was now 21 and fluent in English.

The Associated Press reports that the Florida taxpayers paid about $500,000 for his treatment, which nonetheless was money well spent, since had he not been treated he most likely would have infected others and might have started an epidemic of virtually incurable tuberculosis had he continued to live in the U.S. or attempted to return home to Peru. According to AP reports, doctors had apparently told him he might only live about a month if he returned to Peru.

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What do you suppose is the number one killer among infectious diseases? Ask a number of people, and you will likely get a number of different answers: AIDS, malaria—maybe even this year, swine flu.

But the answer isn’t among the above: It’s pneumonia. Pneumonia claims more than four million lives annually. Just within the U.S., pneumonia claims more lives in a week than swine flu has from its initial outbreak to this date. Worldwide, it kills more children than any other disease—more than AIDS, malaria and measles combined. Children under five account for nearly half the deaths from pneumonia. And guess what is the number one fatal complication to swine flu? Yep. Pneumonia.

Although it primarily kills those under five or over 65, no one is entirely safe from pneumonia. A strong immune system is of course your best defense. In summertime, see that you get enough sunlight to maintain your vitamin D levels. Supplement with vitamin D3 or high-vitamin cod liver oil in winter. And in all seasons, get plenty of vitamin C—three grams or more daily.

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