“If one does not feel it is a moral obligation, well, sometimes policy makers do things out of fear,” he said.
The disease is spread by tiny droplets released when a person coughs or laughs. Holland wants to use his story to reverse that trend. In Massachusetts, for example, when inflation is factored in, funding for the cluster of programs that includes TB control has dropped 25 percent since 2008. That is part of the reason he thinks policy makers fail to adequately fund TB control. TB is easy for politicians to ignore, he said, because it primarily affects the marginalized: refugees, the homeless, the imprisoned, the impoverished. To Holland, that isn’t just a public health issue. If the patients don’t complete treatment, the bacteria that cause TB could become drug-resistant. They also have to monitor each patient to make sure they’re swallowing their daily handful of toxic pills. Public health officials have to track down and test everyone who may have been exposed. The last time we saw such an uptick in the raw number of annual cases was in 1992, the worst year of a TB resurgence linked to big cuts in public health budgets and the spread of HIV, which destroys immune systems.Įach case of TB creates a monumental amount of work. And the increase in 2015 is proportional to population growth. TB remains rare in the US: there are just three cases per 100,000 people. Last year, 10.4 million people got sick with TB - nearly a million more than a United Nations estimate for 2014. Globally, TB presents a bigger problem than anyone thought, according to a World Health Organization report released last week. The disease has sparked panic in places like Marion, Ala., where public health officials desperate to stop the spread earlier this year began paying residents to take their medicine. But in 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 9,563 cases of TB. Courtesy Kelly Hollandįor nearly 60 years, the number of active TB cases in the US has been generally moving downward. Kelly Holland’s chest shows a hole a little bigger than a golf ball in his left lung, seen here in the lower right. But it also turned him into an activist at what could be a critical time for TB in the United States.
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