Worst TB outbreak in 20 years kept secret

[saveliberty]

Palm Beach Post:

 

Updated: 6:10 p.m. Sunday, July 8, 2012 | Posted: 10:52 a.m. Sunday, July 8, 2012

Worst TB outbreak in 20 years kept secret

 

State rushes closure of its only TB hospital in Lantana

 

 

^{Stacey Singer}

^{Lilla Charline Burkhalter, 60, comes to the Clara White center for breakfast most mornings. It was here, in the soup kitchen, that a man with active, coughing TB was recently identified, leading to the discovery that Jacksonville was in the midst of the largest TB outbreak in the country. Burkhalter is coughing, but she says it’s her emphysema acting up. (Photo by Stacey Singer)}

 

 

 

 

 

_{Gary Coronado}

_{Last day of work for employees of A.G. Holley State Hospital in Lantana on Monday July 2, 2012. The Florida Legislature voted to close the state’s only tuberculosis hospital. (Gary Coronado/The Palm Beach Post)}

 

 

 

 

^{Stacey Singer}

^{The Clara White Mission in Jacksonville. (Photo by Stacey Singer)}

By Stacey Singer

Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

 

JACKSONVILLE —

The CDC officer had a serious warning for Florida health officials in April: A tuberculosis outbreak in Jacksonville was one of the worst his group had investigated in 20 years. Linked to 13 deaths and 99 illnesses, including six children, it would require concerted action to stop.

 

That report had been penned on April 5, exactly nine days after Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed the bill that shrank the Department of Health and required the closure of the A.G. Holley State Hospital in Lantana, where tough tuberculosis cases have been treated for more than 60 years.

 

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H/T Instapundit

 

Read the whole thing, including the comments that a reader sent to Glenn Reynolds.