DENTON (UNT), Texas -- Health officials in Europe and the United States are trying to track down the roughly 80 people who were exposed to a rare drug-resistant form of tuberculosis. Those people traveled on the same transatlantic airplane flights as did a 31 year old Atlanta man who is under federal quarantine for the disease. An associate professor of geography at the University of North Texas and a researcher in the emerging field of medical geography says understanding how diseases spread is the key to limiting it. Dr. Joseph Oppong says, "You literally have to track the movements of an infected person. All a person has to do to be exposed to TB is to be in close proximity to the infected person for a given amount of time. That's why it's so important to find out who sat within a couple of rows of the infected man on those airplane flights, as well as anybody who walked in his immediate area." Oppong adds, "That level of exposure is based on their proximity to the person who has the disease and the duration of time that they were exposed. This is exactly what we learned several years ago when studying the spread of TB in a Fort Worth homeless shelter." He says most people who are infected by the tuberculosis bacteria never develop the disease because their immune systems fight it, but others who have conditions like diabetes or AIDS do not have a strong enough immune system to battle the bacteria. Still, Oppong says the exposure levels to this form of tuberculosis could have been higher--except for one thing. "One consolation is that the patient had started on medicine before he left on this trip. That may mean his level of infectivity may not have been as high as it could have been," Oppong says. Oppong is the former chair of the medical geography specialty group of the Association of American Geographers. He can be reached at (940) 565-2181. |
