Tales from the Dark Ages
The recent stories of the resurgence of tuberculosis, first in Kansas and now in my home state of North Carolina, stirred up some long forgotten memories for me.
It seems strange to recount now, but when I went to work as a prison guard in the 1980s, the unit where I worked housed a category of offender known as a health law violator. These inmates were invariably chronic street alcoholics who had contracted tuberculosis and been non-compliant when it came to taking their medication. The state of North Carolina in all of its infinite wisdom decided at some point in the distant past that the best solution to this problem was to make it a crime. They would arrest these men and send them to the prison where I worked where they would receive treatment for TB. When they were no longer contagious, they would be released.
It was a grim situation, made even grimmer by the conditions of their confinement. The men were housed in a single cell segregation unit, the same type of housing used for prisoners convicted of disciplinary offenses. The health law violators only got to come out of their cells for an hour a day, always wearing a mask. They could mix with each other, but not with anyone else from the population. They were not allowed visitors. Eventually, the law was changed and by the time I left that kind of work in 1993, the Department of Correction had gotten out of the tuberculosis treatment business.
I don't know if anyone has figured out the logic behind the recently announced cuts to medical research by the fascist government of the United States. Not only are we getting a certified lunatic who admitted that a worm had eaten part of his brain as a cabinet secretary in charge of Health and Human services in Robert Kennedy, Jr., we are apparently just giving up on cancer. Not to worry because the US has also stopped AIDS eradication in Africa and assistance with other worldwide diseases because…I don't know. Fuck all those brown people. Right?
The tuberculosis comeback should scare people. You see, the prison where I worked in the 80s was originally built to house nothing but prisoners with tuberculosis, not health law violators like I dealt with, but run-of-the-mill bank robbers and cat burglars who just happened to also have TB. There were that many of them. It was only a mile away from a gigantic sanitorium the state operated to treat regular citizens who had the disease.
I remember a time, also back in the 80s when the US government also didn't give a damn about sick Americans, specifically sick gay Americans during the early days of the AIDS epidemic. St. Ronald Ray-gun couldn't even be bothered to say the name of the illness out loud. That's what we are headed back to now, except the American fascists are uncaring about all the non-billionaires. They plan to let idiots of all stripes forego vaccinations. In the face of a pandemic, no one will have to take any precautions against spreading disease. I know this sounds like the rantings of a crazy person, and two months ago, you would have been right if you thought that. Now, I am right. We are screwed, and eggs are still expensive.
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