WW1 trench fever identified in former homeless man in Canada
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
In the meantime, I've seen articles about "the return of Medieval diseases" to California on the front page of HN.
The reason this stuff should concern you is not simply compassion for the poorest of the poor but because disease can be caught by anyone. If you create conditions that serve as a breeding ground for serious illness in some people, you create conditions that put everyone at risk.
This is also why more developed countries need to be concerned with what goes on in less developed countries: We are breeding antibiotic resistant infections in some places due to a lack of adequate hygiene and then sometimes those people get medevaced elsewhere for treatment.
The issue here is not "Wow, we treat homeless people like crap!" Yeah, we do. The issue is "And even if you don't care how we treat homeless people, you should care that we are breeding diseases that we see as in the past and this puts everyone at risk."
Social justice issues are public health issues a la "The life you save may be your own."
I don't think this is an issue, or rather the preferred solution for that seems to be to close borders and keep all the poor people out. Reminding the proponents of this "solution" that e.g. the people immigrating from Africa to the EU to ask for asylum may be carrying diseases that are not found in the Western world is likely to cause a hardening of the anti-immigration and anti-asylum stance, rather than any support for better hygiene in developing nations.
From a national point of view, it's simpler to keep homeless people away from rich peoples' homes than to make sure they don't get sick. So the self-interest argument is not really going to work with people who are already doing fine in their self-interest, they thank you.
Increasingly we are also seeing antibiotic-resistant bacteria from overseas reaching Australia through returning travellers.
https://www.news-medical.net/health/Global-travel-and-antibi...
Antibiotic resistance is also intricately linked to travel health and has many implications for travellers. Overuse of antibiotic medications for ailments such as traveller’s diarrhea has contributed to the spread of antibiotic resistance. In Southeast Asia, for example, ciprofloxacin and other fluoroquinolone antibiotics are no longer effective in treating traveller’s diarrhea since they are resistant to Campylobacter, Escherichia coli, Salmonella, and Shigella bacteria.
In Pakistan, extensively drug-resistant Typhoid Fever is growing since antibiotics such as ampicillin and ciprofloxacin no longer work. Cases have been reported in returning travellers from North America, the UK, Denmark and Australia. Travellers can be at the forefront of antimicrobial resistance – we are sentinels that can provide clues or alert researchers to developments on the ground.
https://www.iamat.org/blog/fighting-back-against-antibiotic-...
At some point we as a society need to make a statement that living outside, even seemingly by choice, especially in context of mental illness or drug addiction is not something that should be respected or tolerated.
We're at the point where cities (spurred on by activists) have exempted homeless population from all municipal regulations and decided that allowing people with drug addiction and mental illness to live in squalor, and filth is a basic human right that trumps forceful institutionalization. I really don't understand why forced institutionalization into highly regulated institutions, staffed by clinical professionals is so evil.
Worse, a social worker friend of mine in the homeless space, highlighted one issue that I wasn't even aware of. She says she sees young people who are 'homeless' as a lifestyle choice, using (and draining) resources earmarked for the chronic homeless (typically those suffering from mental illness). She is convinced that this group is at least partially responsible for the large part of the waste in this space.
https://sites.psu.edu/psy533wheeler/2017/02/08/u01-ronald-re...
Deinstitutionalisation was a combination of changing attitudes by public (hollywood movies certainly did not help with movies like 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'), activism, courts strengthening rights to the point where institutionalization was not possible, and yes, cost cutting by States.
The alternative to that abuse we now see is much worse, with thousands upon thousands of the drug-using homeless dead from overdoses.
But I think we can do better than abusive institutions, and the current activist-spawned free-for-all, where the mentally ill have no boundaries imposed on them.
I would like to see some good studies on this. I do wonder if the scale of the problem was really as large as you make it out to be. I suspect not.
It also raises the question why not simply implement better policy and better oversight, instead of wholesale closure, which as you argued, is much worse.
The people that take such a view often get hysterical over non-homeless people refusing to wear masks. I think it implies an build-in double-standard.
We all deserve the opportunity to not be homeless, first and foremost. We'd nip the problem of homeless people catching ancient diseases in the bud if we made sure they're housed and have access to clean water and two proper meals a day, like.
That's not to say that the homeless should be left to rot in sickness, quite the contrary. But we already let them rot in homelessness and I'm saying that this should also be taken care of.
PS. This is confusing in light of [3].
[1] https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/230294-overview (https://archive.vn/NSqa8)
Trench fever is a clinical syndrome caused by infection with Bartonella quintana; the condition was first described during World War I. Contemporary B quintana disease, commonly referred to as urban trench fever, is typically found in homeless, alcoholic, and poor populations. The human body louse Pediculus humanus var corporis is the major vector involved in trench fever transmission.
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/lice/head/epi.html
In the United States, infestation with head lice (Pediculus humanus capitis) is most common among preschool- and elementary school-age children and their household members and caretakers. Head lice are not known to transmit disease; however, secondary bacterial infection of the skin resulting from scratching can occur with any lice infestation.
[3] https://jbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/jbiol114
Head and body lice used to be designated Pediculus capitis and P. corporis but they are now known to belong to the same species, P. humanus x[16, 17]. Fifty years ago Levene and Dobzhansky [18] showed that head lice could be trained or adapted to become the rather larger body lice by attaching them to the body in small pill boxes. [...] Body lice, and occasionally head and pubic lice, transmit bacterial diseases: typhus (Rickettsia prowazekii) [29], trench fever (Bartonella quintana) and relapsing fever (Borellia recurrentis). The lice themselves succumb to typhus infection but pass the Rickettsia in their feces, which the human then scratches into the skin. Typhus is known as 'war fever' and 'jail fever' because it appears in conditions where lice thrive. At the end of Rats, Lice and History Zinsser [1] wrote "Typhus is not dead. It will live on for centuries and will break into the open whenever human stupidity and brutality give it a chance." Sadly, Zinsser's words were prophetic. Within a few years, typhus became the major slayer in the Nazi concentration camps; typhus broke out among Rwandan refugees in Burundi in 1994, in Bosnia in 1995 and most recently in Goma.