Quote from: stereotype on January 30, 2017, 12:08:20 PM

Quote from: iamnotback on January 22, 2017, 02:07:14 PM

It is ridiculous that I could go so long without knowing I had TB.

Since you were living in the Philippines last year, and you have children who are half-Filipino........ridiculous indeed.

Dude, I've apparently had Tuberculosis for several years. I've been living in the Philippines continuously since 2005, and greater than 50% of time from 1991 to 2004.

What is ridiculous is how fucking stupid the doctors are here.

Quote from: iamnotback on January 27, 2017, 06:59:41 PM

Additionally my doctor in 2012 for my acute peptic ulcer had prescribed levofloxacin without first testing me for TB, thus if I already had TB then (which is very likely as I think it caused my ulcer) then he made my TB resistant to the only second line drug treatment for multi-drug resistant TB.

A competent doctor should not prescribe the main second line drug for curing TB to someone in a country with 70 - 80% incidence of latent TB where up to 1% of the active cases are resistant to all 4 of the first line drugs!!

If I have a strain of TB resistant to the main 4 drugs, then if that idiot doctor made my TB resistant also to levofloxacin, then basically there are no drug remaining to cure the TB!!

He was treating me for h.pylori and I had a very toxic olfactory reaction to clarithromycin so he decided to prescribe me levofloxacin, but he should know that he must test for TB before giving me levofloxacin, because it can make my TB resistant to levofloxacin, thus meaning I could become incurable. When taking levofloxacin for curing TB, you take much higher doses and for much longer prior of time, than for treating h.pylori.

That is insane. If he had tested me for TB, I wouldn't have been sick for 4 fucking years, which caused me to go bankrupt.

That is fucking ridiculous. In a foreign country, you would sue the doctor for malpractice.

Quote from: iamnotback on January 30, 2017, 11:17:36 AM

I am simply giving a warning to foreigners to be very careful when visiting the third world. I don't think most foreigners realize that LTBI (latent tuberculosis infection) has a 70 - 80% incidence in the Philippines. The WHO hides that statistic by only displaying the annual rate of active disease at 0.3% who actually bother to go to a hospital (many poor people don't bother to go), but that is very misleading. Actually nearly all the people have LTBI that can become active at any moment so the likelihood of infection is very great. Also one can be active and not even realize it is TB, as in my case. I think sharing that information to my fellow foreigners is helpful.