Canada's TB legacy

By tsmith on May 10, 2007.

Last month I noted the story of Robert Daniels, a patient with drug-resistant tuberculosis who's been held in isolation in Arizona in order to prevent spread of the deadly pathogen. While some patient's rights advocates have been outraged, Mr. Daniels' treatment pales in comparison to what Mona at Science Notes writes about:

News has broken that the Canadian government continued to require Native Canadian children to attend residential schools where they could learn "civilized," Christian, European ways, for years after they knew that tuberculosis was rampant in those schools, and they continued to house sick and well children together. So the healthy children caught tuberculosis from the sick ones and spread it back to their communities--and we didn't prevent it. We made it happen! Nobody cared enought to stop it, to speak up, or even to burn down those schools before another child caught a deadly disease.

Check out ScienceNotes for the full, tragic story.

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