[BostonCard]

Doctors are not being cavalier about this. But we're all exposed to life threatening infections and we know it is part of the job. It's part of staying calm and doing our jobs when you don't see us overreacting. I have a 3-5% chance of dying this year instead of the usual 1% that 63 year olds have. Not a good thing but I do have a job to do so I'm going to do it. In the back of your mind you know you could catch something deadly when you sign on for this career, but we're more likely to die of suicide than an infectious disease.

Indeed, last week I went on a medical mission to Honduras (no known covid cases), and the first patient on my second day complained of cough, fever, and weight loss.  A chest X-ray showed what I expected, a right upper lobe pneumonia, and a few hours later his sputum came back AFB positive (that means he had tuberculosis for every non-physician here).  TB kills 1.5 million people a year worldwide, which is 5,000 times as many people as have been killed by Covid-19, and 10 million people became ill with TB (100 times as many as have become infected with Covid-19).  This doesn't even include the 100's of million of people who have a latent TB infection (TB that the body has managed to fight off but which can reactivate in the future).  The good news is that TB is treatable, and just yesterday a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine was published that showed a three drug combination can treat highly drug resistant TB with about a 90% success rate.

BC

[BostonCard]

Doctors are not being cavalier about this. But we're all exposed to life threatening infections and we know it is part of the job. It's part of staying calm and doing our jobs when you don't see us overreacting. I have a 3-5% chance of dying this year instead of the usual 1% that 63 year olds have. Not a good thing but I do have a job to do so I'm going to do it. In the back of your mind you know you could catch something deadly when you sign on for this career, but we're more likely to die of suicide than an infectious disease.

Indeed, last week I went on a medical mission to Honduras (no known covid cases), and the first patient on my second day complained of cough, fever, and weight loss.  A chest X-ray showed what I expected, a right upper lobe pneumonia, and a few hours later his sputum came back AFB positive (that means he had tuberculosis for every non-physician here).  TB kills 1.5 million people a year worldwide, which is 5,000 times as many people as have been killed by Covid-19, and 10 million people became ill with TB (100 times as many as have become infected with Covid-19).  This doesn't even include the 100's of million of people who have a latent TB infection (TB that the body has managed to fight off but which can reactivate in the future).  The good news is that TB is treatable, and just yesterday a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine was published that showed a three drug combination can treat highly drug resistant TB with about a 90% success rate.

BC