Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2007. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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San Francisco Examiner - August 6, 2007
Karle Hille
Dr. Michael Greger, a Rockville-based infectious disease expert and author of "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching," talked to The Examiner about how serious these risks are.
Why don't doctors know what tuberculosis looks like?
For decades, when most physicians practicing now were trained, tuberculosis was in decline in most of the developed world, so much that there were these optimistic estimates that we would eradicate it. I'd be very surprised if most doctors ever actually saw tuberculosis.
What are we doing wrong?
It's a combination of doctors not prescribing the way they should and patients not taking the medication the way they should. We're coming up with this tuberculosis we may not be able to treat.
Then there was HIV. Now in New York City and other places where you have a lot of AIDS, tuberculosis has become a new epidemic.
Will H5N1, the bird flu, crop up on our shores this year?
I'm doubtful of this migratory bird hypothesis. This virus is highly pathogenic and dead birds don't fly. So far it hasn't mutated to spread easily from person to person, but if it does, it's going to be catastrophic. If it is going to land in this country, it won't be on the wings of a sick bird, it will be on the wings of a 747. There's no organization on the planet that's ready for it.
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