Tuberculosis and AIDS Quarantines -- Ineffective Strategies

Tuberculosis and AIDS Quarantines -- Ineffective Strategies of Disease Control

Imagine this. You sit next to someone in a crowded subway car, or come into contact with someone on a daily basis because they live in the same apartment complex. That person coughs frequently, and sometimes spits up blood. Later you find out that person had a contagious disease -- tuberculosis. Then you start to cough. You go to your doctor and find out that same person passed that same contagious illness onto you, because the ailment can be passes through casual contact, simply by breathing in the bacteria through the air. According to the Center for Disease Control, "TB is spread through the air from one person to another. The bacteria are put into the air when a person with active TB disease of the lungs or throat coughs or sneezes. People nearby may breathe in these bacteria and become infected." ("Questions and Answers about TB: How is Tuberculosis Spread?" 2005)

To contain TB in America in the 1950's, it was proposed that individuals should be quarantined, if they were found to have the illness because it was potentially deadly. "TB bacteria can attack any part of the body such as the kidney, spine, and brain. If not treated properly, TB disease can be fatal. In fact, TB disease was once the leading cause of death in the United States ... Starting in the 1940s; scientists discovered the first of several medicines now used to treat TB. As a result, TB slowly began to decrease in the United States. But in the 1970s and early 1980s, the country let its guard down and TB control efforts were neglected. As a result, between 1985 and 1992, the number of TB cases increased. However, with increased funding and attention to the TB problem, we have had a steady decline in the number of persons with TB since 1992. But TB is still a problem; more than 14,000 cases were reported in 2003 in the United States." ("Questions and Answers about TB: What is TB & How is TB Spread," 2005)

In two essential features, TB shares some commonalities with the AIDS virus. First of all, as with AIDS, individuals can be silent, unknowing carriers of tuberculosis, even if they exhibit no symptoms. Just as people can have the HIV virus dormant within their bodies for years and show no symptoms, not everyone infected with TB bacteria becomes sick. People who are not sick have what is called latent TB, even though they can still spread the virus through a casual cough, as the bacteria fly through the air. Also, TB, like AIDS may have lured the public in to a sense of false security in the present day and age, as AIDS can now be contained with medications, people are no longer taking precautions regarding safe sex.

But there is a fundamental difference between TB and AIDS -- although both are frightening, conditions, AIDS cannot be spread through merely casual contact, and TB can be spread through the air. Thus, quarantining individuals with AIDS as was proposed in the 1980's, would have been ineffective, given that the disease is not spread through casual contact. Undiagnosed individuals could have spread the illness, and quarantined individuals could have still held jobs, lived with their loved ones, and infected no one, provided that they did not engage in risky sex or share needles with others.