Last week, the New York Times reported a tuberculosis outbreak in Marion Alabama so severe that TB incidence in Marion is now at a rate that exceeds TB incidence in much of the developing world. Marion is the county seat of Perry County and it is saying something when a city of roughly 3,600 people has had 20 cases of active TB diagnosed in the last two years alone, producing two TB related deaths. Those who count TB infections do not typically count latent infections — relatively easily if time-consumingly treated — though these have been documented in a further two dozen people.
Now, if there have been 20 active cases, the latent infection rate is likely much higher than that, but no one knows how much higher since screening for latent TB infection in the general population is not standard procedure in the United States. Why such screening for latent TB has not been pursued earlier in Alabama is a more difficult question. Long before the New York Times arrived on the scene, TB cases have been unusually high in Alabama. The number of tuberculosis cases increased in 2014 in Alabama, but decreased nationwide. Across the nation, the number of new infections decreased by more than 2 percent. In 2014, there were 133 cases of tuberculosis in Alabama, compared to 108 the year before. The TB trajectory in Alabama has not been good for some time.
The reasons for this are hard to parse. As the New York Times points out, there is a tradition of limited access to health care in this low income rural community where lack of reliable transportation to health care venues looms as one of the chief causes of limited health care access. Since the data shows that those with transportation — disproportionately the insured — use that transportation to leave the community for health care, leaving the uninsured lacking transportation to seek care locally, it is no wonder 54 of Alabama's 55 rural counties have official shortages of primary care providers. After all, good payor mix in your patient panel is one of the ingredients to successful sustainable practice.
A people who lack the resources and opportunity to access care have a limited culture of care. The disincentives to leave the community, even when able to do so, are complicated by a general distrust of health care providers, particularly among African American residents. Ironically, a provider-patient relationship built on trust may be the scarcest health care resource of all in Marion.
But the situation is more complicated than this even, since the conversion rate between latent TB infection and active (or manifest) TB infection is not evenly distributed among the TB exposed population.Drug users, alcoholics, and, in particular, those who are HIV positive are particularly at risk of TB exposure converting into active TB. Drug use, particularly use of injectables like heroin, appears to havemore than a toe hold in Marion. The Marion refrain "I don't want nobody knowing my business" in response to public health attempts at contact tracing for those with active TB may make more sense evaluated in light of access or lack thereof to drug treatment programs in Marion.
On the international stage, public health authorities struggle with the prevalence of active TB infection in injectable drug using and HIV positive populations. In the developing world, there is some evidence that financial incentives to promote screening and successful treatment, if required, have begun to make a dent in promoting the completion of TB treatment. Interestingly, TB screening incentives are reported as now being offered to the entire Marion community and not exclusively to relatively high risk sub-populations such as the homeless or self-disclosed injectable drug users.
Is it that the United States Public Health Service and the Alabama State Department of Public Health as well as county public health officials are unaware that broad screening incentives are not the norm? Or, is it that in a community of a few thousand, the only way to screen at significant levels is to create an incentive for all to be screened in a de-stigmatized way? Whether it is folly or it is genius, only time will tell. But if it is the syndemic of injectable drug use and TB or HIV and TB masquerading as an outbreak of TB alone that ails Marion, it will take far more than screening incentive payments and TB treatment incentive payments to right what is wrong with Marion — emblematic of so much that is amiss in rural low income America.
x-posted at prawfsblawg
Missouri State of Mind 