Park Sook-hyun (25, not her real name) works for a small company. When she at last visited her doctor, she had been losing weight for no apparent reason for a month and eventually lost 8 kg. She also suffered from high fever, feelings of fatigue and muscle pain. An X-ray and other tests revealed that she had active pulmonary tuberculosis -- a disease once believed practically eradicated in advanced nations. Patients start showing symptoms one or two months after contracting the disease, and they spread TB germs one or two weeks before the symptoms appear. Without knowing it, Park had been spreading TB germs for five or six weeks. "You need to let not just your family members but your colleagues know that they may have contacted TB because of you,¡± her doctor told her. But Park told no one.
Many people consider TB a disease of the past that spread when the nation was poor. But there are some 40,000 new TB patients every year and more than 3,000 of them die of the disease. It is not only homeless people who suffer from severe malnutrition and those in the lowest social class who contract the disease. TB germs are all around us: in theaters, classrooms, nurseries, internet cafes, public bathrooms and crowded subway trains. If you are malnourished and your immune system is weakened, you can come down with the disease any time.
In several recent cases entire groups of people have become infected together. A high school in Ansan reported that 46 students in all came down with TB after it produced its first TB patient in November last year. At first, the number stood at one or two a month but it skyrocketed to 13 in June and 21 in July. TB patients spread germs without knowing it and this is why such a chain-reaction phenomenon takes place. A high school in Busan also confirmed that 18 of its students contracted TB recently and three of its neighboring schools saw 23 TB patients. In December 2003, 13 people in a conscripted police unit in Seoul came down with TB.
Kim Hee-jin, a TB researcher with the Korean Institute of Tuberculosis (KIT), said, "It¡¯s estimated that such cases where a group of people come down with TB take place relatively frequently in crowded places such as nurseries, preschools, internet cafes, reading rooms and nursing homes, and it is possible that office workers contract the disease due to their colleagues.¡± This is why younger people here, who often spend a great deal of time in groups, make up such a high percentage. As for new TB patients in 2005, the highest proportion was among those in their 20s with 19.4 percent, followed by those in their 30s with 16.2 percent. This is in stark contrast to western nations, where the number of TB patients surged among those around 60, when people's immune power weakens.
"Those who spent their childhood in the 60s and the 70s naturally came to develop TB antibodies, but those born after that did not have the opportunity,¡± Kim said. "We guess the reason TB incidence among young people is so high because they are being exposed to TB germs when their immune system has been weakened by excessive stress and workload, irregular life patterns, diet and lack of exercise.¡±
Now one-third of Korean adults are estimated to have contracted TB or developed antobodies. Due to improvement in nutrition and hygiene, the number of patients with TB decreased from 1.24 million in 1965 to 169,000 in 2005, but the country still has the highest number among OECD nations. In 2005, some 35,269 people newly contracted the disease and some 3,000 died of it. The incidence rate was 90 cases per population of 100,000, which was more than twice as high as the 42 in second-ranked Portugal. Korea also ranked first in terms of morality rate, with the number more than double those of the second-ranked nations --Mexico, Portugal, and Turkey -- at 10 cases per a population of 100,000. This shows that Korea has a long way to go in fighting TB.
The overall number of TB patients has continuously decreased over 30 to 40 years, but the number of new infections turned upward again in 2000. What is worse, there is concern about a possible spread of a super-TB strain. According to the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report Series released in March 2006 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 11 percent of Korean TB patients suffer from multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB, and 15 percent of them are super-TB patients, ranking second in terms of the number of super-TB patients after Latvia (19 percent). The super-TB strain, also called extensively drug-resistant (XDR) strain, has been found in 17 nations around the world so far, and has been spreading rapidly to more countries. It is so fatal that 52 of 53 AIDS patients in South Africa who were infected with this TB died within an average 25 days after infection.
A World Health Organization global task force met in Geneva in October 2006 to devise plans to fight XDR TB and urged health authorities to work to prevent the spread of the super TB.
¡°Let alone the XDR TB, MDR TB is also so fatal that one in four who contracts it end up losing their life,¡± says Song Jeong-sup, the director-general of the Korean Academy of Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases. ¡°If it is impossible to put those with TB in quarantine as Japan does, it is necessary to monitor them at least once a week through public health centers.¡±
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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