In mediæval news ...

[riley@toot.cat]

In mediæval news ...

The San Francisco Department of Public Health is investigating an active outbreak of tuberculosis at a local high school that has sickened at least three individuals.

In an emailed statement to SFGATE, department officials said all students and staff at Archbishop Riordan High School are being tested for TB and they have implemented contact tracing to stop the outbreak from spreading.

Source: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/san-francisco-tuberculosis-school-21320252.php

[uilebheist@polyglot.city]

@riley I'm sure we can safely blame RFK, Jr for any return to mediæval diseases. If not directly by his actions, but the competent people he had replaced with ones agreeing with him.

[riley@toot.cat]

@Uilebheist I wonder what the betting markets are predicting about the return of leprosy.

[uilebheist@polyglot.city]

@riley Don't know but I note that World Leprosy Day was last Sunday. I'm sure RFK will have known and done something to increase leprosy in the US.

[I mean "increase" and not "return" - there are still cases of leprosy in the US, although not many, about 150 to 250 per year apparently]

[riley@toot.cat]

@Uilebheist The sad thing is, he'll probably attach it to racism in some way.

The reasons for the downturn of leprosy in Europe a couple of centuries ago — well before the development of penicillin — are stil debated by the sort of scientists who study this stuff, but one of the leading hypotheses is, some sort of gene allele conferring relative immunity may, after the centuries of ravage killed enough suspectible Europeans, have grown dominant enough to severely curb the bacterium's infection rate. But there's still populations around who don't seem to have such an allele — a number of them famously exploited by a certain Teresa (not her biological name) — , and many of them happen to look sufficiently different from the garden variety racist to cause immense phobia in the latter.