#tbfighters

"Eliza Poe, Belladonna, and Inhumane Beauty Standards of Tuberculosis "

"People who are treated as less than human by the social order are more susceptible to tuberculosis... Because they are treated as less than human." -Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

Here are the Tests

I don’t want this to sound like a complaint, but people could not stop telling us about their stuff. Every lab tech and pharmacist. Every community and social worker. I am not a medical professional and half of these things were just words that I didn’t understand, but my goodness were they happy about the stuff they’ve got. 

One way to look at that is to assume it’s because people wanted to let me know that donor money is well spent. There are probably donors out there who need and want that reassurance, perhaps because they’ve had bad experiences in the past or their unconscious bias is telling them they need to check up on any resources shared with poor people.

There is however one form of stuff that I was and remain interested in and that’s the multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDRTB) tests and the machine that uses them. Some readers of this will be well aware of the #TimeFor5 campaign to get the cost of these tests reduced to $5 per test from $15 per test, which is, depending on whom you ask, somewhere between a 300%-500% profit . 

These tests are the difference between following a treatment plan that will cure your TB and one that can ravage your body while the TB you have is still killing you. Over a million and half people needlessly die from TB every year solely because of lack of access to the right tests and medication. By ‘access’ I don’t mean transportation or the ability of a medical facility to handle the tests nor do I mean that not enough tests exist. The resources physically exist. They simply aren’t available to everyone who needs them because a pharmaceutical company decided that the poor people of the world were the right folks to squeeze knowing they don't have many voices to fight for them.

If you don’t know about it, it’s because most of your exposure, no pun intended, to TB as an illness probably comes from historical fiction and you, like many, think of TB as a disease of the past and/or something that affects only a small handful of people in tiny, isolated places. Let me point out that a ‘population’ of 1.6 million dead is far from small and that the vast majority of cases occur within a day’s transport of an international airport.