{"id":15298,"date":"2014-03-31T15:50:51","date_gmt":"2014-03-31T14:50:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=15298"},"modified":"2014-03-31T15:50:51","modified_gmt":"2014-03-31T14:50:51","slug":"two-plus-one-cases-of-tb-equals-media-frenzy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=15298","title":{"rendered":"Two Plus One Cases Of TB Equals Media Frenzy"},"content":{"rendered":"

You\u2019ve probably seen the news this week about two cases of TB being caught from cats<\/a>. I suspect that the cleaners at the Daily Mail and The Sun\u2019s headquarters had to clean a lot of urine-soaked carpets this week, as the entire workforce at both establishments probably pissed itself at this brand new opportunity to scaremonger over something.<\/p>\n

In fact, The Sun has already started. It managed to dig up a story about dog infecting a human with TB. Since The Sun is no longer free online, I\u2019ll include a link to an alternative version from the Daily Mirror<\/a>. You will note the wording which allows a timeframe to be surmised:<\/p>\n

\n

A child has been diagnosed with tuberculosis after catching it from a family dog. <\/p>\n

The pet has now been put down<\/strong> after giving the child the lung disease at a house in Gloucestershire. <\/p>\n

The child, aged under ten, has now made a full recovery<\/strong>, according to the Sun.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is scaremongering at its most pathetic, and the incident appears completely unconnected with the two cat cases. None of the various stories (this one is in the Mail<\/a>) says when the dog-child case occurred, though normal TB treatment lasts typically between 6-12 months<\/a> (in serious cases, for up to 2 years) and if the child in question is \u201cfully recovered\u201d, infection must have occurred at the end of last summer at the latest. However, it does establish the fact \u2013 if it wasn\u2019t already widely known – that TB can<\/strong> be transmitted from badgers to dogs (and cattle), and then from dogs (and cattle) to the kind of people who are then most likely to put the dogs (or cattle) in their mouths. Oh, and vice versa, because there are historical documented cases of dogs apparently catching TB from humans<\/a>. There is no reason to assume that it couldn\u2019t miss out the cattle stage and go straight from badger-to-human, and since almost ANY mammal can carry TB it doesn\u2019t take a giant leap of your imagination to see it being transmitted directly from pets. Vets were warning of it a year ago<\/a>.\"Garfield <\/p>\n

If we look at the recent cat incidents that have resulted in human infection, they are from a cluster of nine cases of feline TB identified last year in Berkshire and Hampshire. To get a full picture of what was going on you really do have to read the the right source \u2013 one which sees value in scooping a dramatic chat with the \u201cvictims\u201d \u2013 because it\u2019s only then that you realise that if someone is as soft as a sack of monkeys they would have the cat up to their face a lot of the time (I like cats, and it\u2019s what I\u2019D<\/strong> do if I still had one, and from what I remember if you forget to rub your face against your cat, the cat will come and rub itself against your face to remind you). The stories attempt to blame cleaning an open wound on one cat as the route of transmission, but I\u2019m not prepared to dismiss the in-your-face route that easily. It\u2019s pretty obvious that if a cat had TB there is no reason why it wouldn\u2019t pass this on to a human who was rubbing it with their nose! The cat involved died from the illness. It was a rescue cat and was already unwell. <\/p>\n

Regular TB in humans is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis<\/em> (abbreviated M. tuberculosis<\/em>). Mycobacterium bovis<\/em> (or M. bovis<\/em>) is the bacterium that causes TB in cattle, and which is carried by badgers and many other mammals \u2013 so many mammals, in fact, that the list includes humans. M. Bovis is the type of TB involved in these pet-human cases<\/em>. According to Public Health England around 6% of TB deaths are attributable to M. bovis<\/em>. <\/p>\n

It is also worth noting that seven of the nine cats found to be positive for M. Bovis<\/em> had bite and scratch wounds consistent with fighting with badgers, according to Carl Gorman – the vet who alerted authorities to the outbreak in Berkshire. He also said he believed that an outbreak in local herd of cattle was to blame. All nine cats lived within a three-mile radius, and six of them within 250 yards of each other. There\u2019s nothing sinister involved, and it is certainly not \u201ca mystery\u201d, as suggested by one cat owner who had to have her cat put down. It is<\/strong> rare, but around 25 cats are nonetheless found to have contracted TB every year in Britain. <\/p>\n

The two cat incidents are the first documented<\/strong> cases of cat-to-human transmission. There\u2019s no reason to assume it hasn\u2019t happened before, or that it won\u2019t happen again. The apparently unrelated dog-to-human case proves that. <\/p>\n

Both Public Health England and Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories<\/a> have assessed the risk to the public as VERY LOW.<\/strong> But I doubt that this will stop our gutter press from pretending otherwise. Remember that almost five years ago to the day we were all going to die of swine flu<\/a>. A couple of years before that, avian flu was going to kill us all<\/a>. They never give up, and I wonder how long it will be before some prat starts talking about culling cats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You\u2019ve probably seen the news this week about two cases of TB being caught from cats. I suspect that the cleaners at the Daily Mail and The Sun\u2019s headquarters had to clean a lot of urine-soaked carpets this week, as the entire workforce at both establishments probably pissed itself at this brand new opportunity to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[102,89,87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-related","category-nature","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15298\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}