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More people are dying of tuberculosis today than ever before, which is "absurd," according to Lee Reichman, MD, MPH, executive director of the New Jersey Medical School (NJMS) National Tuberculosis Center at UMDNJ in Newark. On a mission to save lives and stop a global epidemic of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, Reichman wondered, "How do you get people interested?" A professor of medicine, preventive medicine and community health, Reichman explains, "All my professional life, not a soul has been interested in TB. So I thought, you have to write a book, get yourself on talk shows and make people listen." His new book, Timebomb ($24.95, hardcover), co-authored by Janice Hopkins Tanne, was published on September 28 by McGraw Hill. The good news is: readers are very interested. "This is a preventable, curable disease," Reichman says. Yet, "It is a plague – alas, just like AIDS – that ordinary, middle-class people think they will never get, or ever be exposed to." As his medical thriller points out, "Tuberculosis flies through the air that we breathe like an Ebola (virus) with wings." Antibiotics may have brought miracle cures in the 1940s, but in the years since, loss of public funding, misuse of these wonder drugs and the presence of HIV/AIDS have combined to create a worldwide tuberculosis timebomb. Patients infected with HIV are uniquely susceptible to TB, which has become the leading cause of death among AIDS victims. "TB and HIV are gasoline and a match," according to Reichman. Two billion people in the world are infected with latent TB, including 15 million here in the U.S. Every year, there are 8.4 million new cases of active, usually infectious TB. If you are on an airplane flight longer than eight hours, you run the risk of being infected with TB. In fact, Russia has created a disastrous TB epidemic in its prisons and is spreading the disease through the regular release of hundreds of thousands of sick prisoners. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the U.S. experienced a TB epidemic with the epicenter in New York City. A multi-drug resistant strain of this ancient, airborne, lung disease from Russia was found in New York patients. " I was part of a team which evaluated TB treatment in Russia," Reichman recalls. What he found were decrepit hospitals, inadequate labs and doctors who have been isolated from modern medical practices for decades. His team also encountered Russian officials so stubborn that they have turned down a World Bank loan for $150 million to fight TB because they refuse to accept the proven, comprehensive treatment method. "This is a downer," Reichman admits. "They think our strategy, a long but effective regimen used in 128 countries, is ‘soup kitchen medicine’ that may work in Newark, but they’ve said, ‘We don’t need it in Russia.’" Reichman’s true story will move you from a Ukranian man who infects 13 airline passengers with TB on a flight from Paris to New York, to an outbreak uncovered by DNA fingerprinting among church choir members in Newark, and right into the filthy Russian prisons where everyone is infected. You will even have a front row seat in an operating room to experience, in dramatic detail, the removal of a TB-devastated lung. "I’m giving this cause my best shot," Reichman insists. "Writing a book was the only way I could get some people to listen."
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