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Is Sickness a Crime? Man With TB Locked Up in Solitary Confinement »
Posted by: populist 2 years, 7 months ago27-year-old Robert Daniels is being held against his will in a Phoenix hospital ward reserved for sick prisoners. If state officials have their way, he could be there for the rest of his life.
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populist
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Comments: 54
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FRICKANDFRACK
April 8, 2007, 4:45 p.m.He is not being locked up for being sick,He is being locked up because he is endangering everybody else because he refuses to take wear a mask that would prevent him from infecting those he comes in contact with.
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ballbuster2
April 8, 2007, 5:31 p.m.whats the problem? pull his passport/paper's, do deportation process and send back to russia with love. no problem. next!
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Natureboy
April 9, 2007, 8:52 a.m."? Who was the idiot who deprived him from such, and why ?"
He is under the loving care of the Maricopa County Sherrifs department, which means Sherrif Joe Arpaio, "America's toughest sherrif," is the idiot.
And sherrif Joe IS an idiot, a sawed off, cowardly little bully and media ****** whose screwed up jails and "tent cities" have already cost innocent lives and have resulted in the county paying out millions over wrongful death suits.
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KYRed
April 8, 2007, 11:38 p.m.Wow. TB to lepers to Typhoid Mary to the A bomb. In such a short time. I like it.
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evelyna
April 8, 2007, 11:40 p.m.I heard there was a drug resistant strain of tb in Russia about 4 years ago. There is nothing they can do to cure it.
It happened after communism crashed and people did not have access to decant medical.
I do not see a problem with releasing him.
The USA does not want to insure people unless they can pay about $500 a month and more to access healthcare.
It will not be long before we are living in a desease ridden 3rd world ghetto. There are a lot of Russian immigrants here so it is only a short while.
Share the wealth.
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aceofspades1
April 9, 2007, 1:29 a.m.The Maricopa County sherrif is a neanderthal - next yhing he will probably do is send Daniels to Texas for his injections
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amazed
April 9, 2007, 7:08 a.m.They ought to give the guy a phone, a TV, and a light switch. Other than that, I wouldn't let him out. He has already shown himself to be irresponsible toward the general public. If the guy had regular TB, it would be a different story, but if I contracted drug-resistant TB and the state KNEW that there was someone walking around with it who refused to take even the most basic precautions against spreading it, then I would be seriously upset. In fact, at that point, I would expect that person with the TB to charged with attempted murder. If I died from the TB, the charge should be upgraded to premeditated murder -- because any "reasonable man" (the legal standard) would know that speading an untreatable disease around is tantamount to committing murder.
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evelyna
April 9, 2007, 8:54 a.m.Well they will just have to run out of hospital space when they become filled with diseases that are resistant.
Maybe next they can lock up the bed bugs with him.
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Natureboy
April 9, 2007, 8:58 a.m.Anybody posting here familiar with the (incredibly low) contagious properties of TB? IF you spent 8 hours a day with this guy over a period of several months, you would have a 50% chance of infection.
http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/t/tuberculosis/co...
Imposing imprisonment for life on him because he neglected to wear a mask once is ridiculous. Moreover, he has not been accused of, let alone tried or convicted for, any crime. Putting the guy in what is essentially solitary confinement is punishment imposed without benefit of evidence, charges or trial - the kind of crap we supposedly got over in the middle ages.
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Amazing1
April 9, 2007, 9 a.m.I think he should be kept from spreading the disease. But I see no reason to not let him have a phone, a TV, a computer and a light switch. Not to mention bathing facilities. That's nuts.
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nostalgia
April 9, 2007, 10:15 a.m.This is just not the typical drug resistant TB. This is virtually untreatable. CDC - XDR-TB is cause for concern It is widely distributed geographically & renders patients virtually untreatable with available drugs.
MDR-TB is the common drug resistant TB - resistant to isoniazid and rifampin. These 2 drugs were the ones to eradicate TB in the past.
TB can usually be treated with a course of four standard, or first-line, anti-TB drugs. If these are misused or mismanaged, multidrugresistant TB (MDR-TB) can develop. MDR-TB takes longer to treat with 2nd line drugs - more expensive & have more side-effects. If these drugs are also misused or mismanaged, extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) can develop. Because XDR-TB is resistant to 1st & 2nd line drugs, treatment options are limited & so are the chances of cure.
Medicine News Today: TB is contagious & spreads through the air. If not treated, each person with active TB infects, on average, 10-15 others every year.
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eviln3d
April 9, 2007, 10:19 a.m.Just send him to the Netherlands and pay for his assisted suicide. They guy is dead and just doesn't realize it yet.
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runningspirit
April 9, 2007, 10:53 a.m.It doesn't make sense to do this with TB when it wasn't even done with AIDS.
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2ponies
April 9, 2007, 11:21 a.m.The overlying problem here is that with all of our sophisticated technology, we think we're smart. Actually, we're still intellectual infants. We forced doctors to give us antibiotics for colds and other things and now we're paying the antibiotic-resistance price. We let the lawyers run rampant and over legislate or over litigate most people's basic rights for the benefit of a potentially dangerous few. We are now facing, if not extinction, at least the extremely serious decline of the honey-bee population, which threatens our food supply -- in part because we incorporated genetic engineering into agriculture (I know that many benefits outweighed the known downsides). There is just so much we don't know. But one thing we ought to know is that one person can be "patient zero" -- the source of a deadly epidemic. ADIS and other deadly diseases should have taught us that. So protect this guys basic rights, but protect the people as well.
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edromar2
April 9, 2007, 11:54 a.m.2ponies:
I want to cry out in anguish that this fascist state mentality is incredible, that people can't be sent into a mob hysteria by fear and run over Constitutional rights and basic human dignity by their stupidity and fear.
But it is clear that when even someone who claims to recognize the limitation of our knowledge as you did can go on to support things and claim thin gs that any rational person could not do in decent conscience.
For example, because some folk jumped to the conclusion that honey bees are dying out many places, it is because of genetically engineered and modified plants upon which they feed.
Well I admit that I don't know all of what they feed on, although I remember as a child in Florida that they preferred honeysuckle and orange blossoms and clover. Of those I doubt that any but possibly clover has been genetically engineered or modified. Look at all the other possible causes: the increase in temperature...(continued)
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edromar2
April 9, 2007, 12:06 p.m.2ponies (continued):
Global warming changes everything--globally. Of course I don't know that GW is any more at fault than you know that GEM is in regard to honey bees.
There comes a time in any scientific investigation when what it had been irrational to insist was the case, become irrational to insist is not the case. And it is sometimes very hard to know the exact line. Or rather, there is no exact line between them but a great gulf of skeptical speculation. But the time comes after which it becomes irrational to insist on a change in what has been generally "proven" without significant new evidence and experimental demonstrations of fulfilled predictions.
We are to the point that Global Warming provides such confidence. The possible effects of GEM are not well established at all. So we have no right to panic in the latter case.
Now to apply these lessons to TB. There is a general tendency for antibiotics to speed up genetic modification (continued)
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anioklyComment has been removed: User banned.
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edromar2
April 9, 2007, 12:15 p.m.2ponies (continued):
The mutation of bacteria involved in tuberculosis may be sped up by antibiotics, or any of many other processes. That is neither certain nor important for the issue.
What is important for an issue is that we must create useful and fair legislation to cover all cases where people are considered to be a threat to public health for whatever reason. If criminal penalties might be needed (such as the HIV infected man who persists in exposing his unknowing partners to his disease), then we must decide what responses are rationally necessary to control what we know to be the degree of threat the person poses. And we must write those into criminal law. For to deprive any man of his freedom is a criminal penalty regardless of the reason it is needed.
Every US citizen is guaranteed the right to demand a trial by jury and to confront his accusers. Under our Constitution we can't just lock someone up in our panic! (continued)
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edromar2
April 9, 2007, 12:25 p.m.2 ponies (continued)
There is much that is not yet known about this form of tuberculosis--and much we hope we never find out for certain--like its ability to become a pandemic like people were panicked about regarding bird flu a few years ago.
There are many diseases that involve many bacteria and viruses that are equally drug resistant. Most of those people get from hospitals. I had a sister who went into the hospital for an operation on a varicose vein. Within days she was attacked by a drug resistant bacterium that there was nothing the hospital could do to treat.
Such victims are not criminals. If a criminal court sentences a guy to house arrest after a trial by his peers in which his lawyers can challenge the need for such stringent matters, even to wearing one of those ankle bracelet locators--or to a hospital in acute cases. That is one thing.
But this guy was shafted by a civil court judge and a cruel and inhuman sheriff.
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edromar2
April 9, 2007, 12:33 p.m.aniokly's paranoid panic is clear again in her attacking calls of constitutional progressives for calling for deliberate fairness here.
She asks: "Would one of you Liberals like to take this guy home to live in your spare room?"
Any real Christian in the position to provide the guy with the help he needs would do anything they can to provide the victim of such a disease with what he needs.
If I lived close to where he is being treated I would make a spare bedroom in my home (we keep for when my daughter, the doctor, comes home to visit), available for his family to come to live in close to his home. I would go to read to him, even if it had to be through a glass window. Real Christians would be as we speak contributing to his defense fund and taking TV sets and computers to the hospital and demand the right to visit him outside hall windows,etc...
Aniokly said she thought not--but she never thought. She ust panics in ignorance! (continued)
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edromar2
April 9, 2007, 12:45 p.m.Aniokly said:
All he had to do is comply with changes in his life so as not be a threat to others.
He was told he had to give up many freedoms most of us take for granted without a trial and an opportunity to force the doctors to prove to him that those changes were necessary. According to the doctors quoted in Goodman's piece, in fact, much of what they claimed was needed was not.
No one including him would want him to be a threat to any one. And apparently he was not a threat to anyone during the time he was rejecting some self-important and possibly half-trained but arrogant doctor's advice. No one caught his bug.
Aniokly says "He refused." But a person has a right to refuse a doctor's advice. I would be dead right now if I had not refused a doctor's advice. Had he been sentenced to wear a face mask by a criminal action in a court of law, if the dioctor had made a case, the guy would have gladly worn the mask. His previous doctors did not require that.
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edromar2
April 9, 2007, 12:54 p.m.Aniokly:
I would like to see if doctors could make a good case, medically, for his having to wear a mask constantly--or if he could not eat dinners out in restaurants--in spite of food service people supposedly being able to sanitize dishes. So does he have to eat out of paper plates and use plastic utensiles in the hospital. Or should he have to eat out of paper dishes in restaurants. There is so much we don't know about the man, his illness and his situation, that it is time to quit jumping to panicked conclusions in your paranoia.
Is he always wearing a mask now when nurses and doctors are present? Do they wear them? Or do they know something more than we do--like they need them only if he is going to cough in their faces? By now he might do it out of spite!
So Aniokly, you don't know that "He is where he should be at this time."
Of course, "if they find a cure, or an anti-biotic he will be fine," (duh?) What can be done for him now.
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edromar2
April 9, 2007, 1:02 p.m.elll:
Neither can tuberulosis. Not simply by breathing--by coughing, maybe. I really would like to know what precautions doctors and nurses take while treating such patients, other than making sure they don't cough in their medical helpers' faces.
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