TB: We should feel shamed, not threatened by it

In the 1980's, after a trip to Bangladesh, I ended up having a series of tests at the Hospital for
Tropical Diseases in London. I hadn't picked up anything life-threatening, just an unfamiliar
organism that gave me digestion problems. The point I am making is that white people go
aboard and get ill on their return, just as much as British people of Asian descent.
Some newspapers have been quick to point out that »more than 90 per cent« of the pupils at
Crown Hills Community College are Asian, and that some of them may travel to parts of the
Indian sub-continent where TB is rife. The press managed to find a white pupil at the school
and published a photograph of her looking sombre, alongside a story describing her positive
reaction to a TB test.
In fact it is more accurate to say that most of the pupils are of Asian origin, since they were
born in Britain. Nor do we know the source of the outbreak, as health officials in Leicester
declared last week. Notifications of TB, which was once thought beaten by modern drugs and
a mass vaccination programme have been going up in Britain for some time, particulary
among homeless people, regardless of their ethnic origin.
But there is a rule in this country which holds that all infections are introduced by foreigners.
Even the foot and mouth outbreak – which most sensible people attribute to poor animal
husbandry and an astonishing number of animal movements – has been blamed on illegally
imported meat, intended for Chinese restaurants. It is both an island mentality and an
embattled one, as Dr. Thomas Stuttaford's commentary in Thursday's Times confirmed. TB is
indifferent to status, he wrote, »whether carried by traveller, refugee, asylum-seeker or
economic migrant.
»You are a prime candidate for meningitis,« a nurse informed me cheerfully last year when I
went to update my vaccinations; I have now been immunized against eight major diseases
including yellow fever, and should be safe to go almost anywhere. Except that, in an
increasingly globalised world, none of us can ever be truly safe.
This month I am travelling to the Amazon rain forest in Ecuador, where the mosquitoes carry
a particularly nasty strain of malaria. I have been prescribed preventive drugs, but there is still
a risk of contracting the disease. The real scandal of TB is not that the number of cases is
rising in Britain, but that the disease still affects so many people in developing countries. I
remember being shocked in Bangladesh by seeing people coughing blood in the streets.
Rather than regarding foreign sufferers as a threat – and there is no evidence at the time of
writing that the disease was brought to Leicester directly from the sub-continent – the West
should be ashamed that t has done so little to eradicate it worldwide.