New Zealanders were forced to pay up $330,000 for a secret charter flight to return a tourist to South Korea after she arrived here with a potentially fatal and infectious illness.In another case of leading the OECD in undesirable categories, a 2005 Chosun Ilbo article says that South Korea ranked first in the organization of 30 countries in new tuberculosis cases. Eighty-nine percent of cases were considered "active," meaning the patients were at risk of spreading the disease. And how is the disease transmitted?
The 67-year-old arrived on an Korean Air flight, aware she had a deadly form of tuberculosis, but hid her medications so she could get through our border control. She spent days with her daughter before visiting a doctor and was then isolated for months in Auckland Hospital.
Commercial airlines refused to carry the woman and the chartered jet had to be fitted with a negative pressure chamber, designed for the SARS epidemic, to ensure the pilots did not catch the illness.
When people suffering from active pulmonary TB cough, sneeze, speak, or spit, they expel infectious aerosol droplets 0.5 to 5 µm in diameter. A single sneeze can release up to 40,000 droplets.[18] Each one of these droplets may transmit the disease, since the infectious dose of tuberculosis is very low and the inhalation of just a single bacterium can cause a new infection.
Hmmm, disconcerting. The disease has been enough of an issue over time that a descendant of the first foreign settlers to this area established a TB clinic in Suncheon in 1960, and the family continues similar work in North Korea today.
1 comment:
I used to teach a doctor that told me that TB was on the rise in Seoul because of the anorexic women in the city. They had malnourished themselves to the point of compromising their immune systems thereby allowing the infection to spread much easier and faster in Seoul's high density population.
Shocking answer for the question "What's new with you?"
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