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Comment by arcbyte | Hacker News Reader

Nobody cares if she runs off to a national forest and disappears in the wild where she can't be around others to spread infection.

But to be around other people, knowing or should knowing that she is causing a high probability of harm to others IS a crime.

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Such a high probability that in 2-3+ years there’s zero evidence she spread TB.

There’s a reason TB isn’t an issue any more… we have dramatically improved health, smoke dramatically less AND have effective antibiotics. TB kills how many people in the US? Oh right… less than strep, do we lock up people with strep? Of course not.

13 million people today in the US have latent TB. Effectively, their body fought it odd and isolated the bacteria. We don’t lock them up. What evidence do we have that this person has an active case AFTER 2-3 years?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/661344/tuberculosis-deat...

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/tuberculosis/...

https://www.cdc.gov/tb/publications/factsheets/general/tb.ht...

If her case was latent and she wasn't a danger of spreading the disease, my understanding is that her lungs wouldn't be so ravaged that they look like she has late stage lung cancer under an x-ray. And others have pointed out your 2-3 year number is weird and not terribly accurate as well.

The case is from 2021 (ruling Jan 2022) meaning her rejection of treatment had to be prior to that. She had to have TB even before that. It’s fair to assume she got it mid-2021 or earlier

ok so now that the minor disagreement about dates has been resolved, how about the major disagreement over evidence her disease is not latent?

There's now Antibiotic resistant TB and if we keep using antibiotics for TB were risking creating more AB resistant strains.

It's best if people don't get infected with it to begin with

Antibiotic resistant TB is exponentially scarier to me than COVID.

There’s a reason TB isn’t an issue any more…

And, yet, an article from 3 days ago calls it a global health threat and notes that a million people die from it annually.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/2023/5/30/23738607/tuberculosis...

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