Dynamic - It is sad that you are willing to trivialize a read danger simply to argue.
I find that I must "trivialize" a number of real dangers just so as to be able to get through a day. I can only assume that most others do this as well. There just aren't enough hours in the day to worry about everything worth worrying about.
In this thread, the drug-resistant TB situation has been described as "scary" and "EXTREMELY scary". I will stand by my response to that: it's a cause for concern, but not for alarm. There may not be a perfect balance point between those two, but my approach is to do what I can about those things I may be able to actually do something about, and try not to dwell too much on the others. But maybe that's just me.
In developed countries, more than six times as many people die from heart disease than from TB, and about the same from cerebrovascular disease. These are largely preventable diseases, but only to the extent that one recognizes the dangers and takes steps to avoid the risk factors. The same can be said of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, which kills nearly twice as many people as does TB. There's a
very good chance (not merely a "
fairly good chance") that I will join that statistical group soon, as I have not always taken the same approach to avoiding risk factors that I do now, and as a result, my lung function test scores now place me in the "very severe" category there. Influenza and pneumonia both pose a much greater risk for me than they do for the average person, but even for the average person in the US, they pose a much greater statistical risk than does TB.
As a tool for maintaining some modicum of mental and emotional stability in the face of these very real dangers, I sometimes remind myself that if I make it through the day, I will have outlived a large number of people who, despite having started the day with perfectly healthy lungs, will have died from firearms, traffic accidents, and other causes. Having seen first-hand what death by COPD looks like makes it a little easier to accept the fact that I am eligible for those as well.
So let's keep this in perspective: Of the ten leading causes of death in the US, tuberculosis doesn't even make the list (and incidence continues its steady decline). Even in those undeveloped countries where it does, it is well behind heart disease and stroke. I'll repeat: For a person who smokes a lot and never exercises and has poor dietary habits and spends a lot of time driving (especially while drinking, texting, or talking on the phone), TB does not deserve first priority for the worry units.
I still maintain that the real danger is not TB itself, but the poverty which creates conditions that allow it to thrive -- and that the real threat from drug-resistant TB is not the drug-resistant TB itself, but the phenomenon of drug resistance in general. One might even go a step further and argue (which I fully admit that I do enjoy) that it is not the drug resistance itself, but our heavy reliance on antibiotics which creates the problem
This concept may be extended just as far as one pleases. Consider the dikes that provide flood protection for low-lying areas in, say, the Netherlands. Build them, and people come to rely on them. The longer those dikes are able to provide effective protection, the greater the number of people whose lives depend on them not to fail. Yet are they not ultimately doomed to fail at some point?
"Trivialize a real danger"? We build our homes on the floodplains of major rivers and at the feet of active volcanoes. We climb inside steel boxes weighing several tons and go hurtling down highways at sixty plus miles an hour and inside aluminum tubes that scream through the air at hundreds of miles an hour at tens of thousands of feet above the ground -- and sometimes, just for fun, we strap big nylon sheets to our backs and jump out. We jump off tall bridges after tying big rubber bands to our ankles. We climb on the backs of bulls and see how long we can stay on, or stand in front of them and see how many times we can jump out of the way without getting gored. We drink and drive, we smoke in bed, we elect delusional religious fanatics to important government positions and consider the idea of placing them in control of the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
We're humans. We
laugh in the face of danger.
