“I think being in prison is a double punishment,” said Alberto García-Basteiro, an associate research professor at Barcelona Institute for Global Health who was not involved in the study. “One, being deprived of liberty, and second, being exposed to several diseases.”, which can spread from one person to another through the air. It usually affects the lungs but can spread to other areas of the body, including the spine, kidneys and brain.
“The proportion of undiagnosed [prisoners] was higher than I expected,” said Leonardo Martinez, lead author and an epidemiologist at Boston University, indicating the urgent need for health organizations around the world to increase efforts to curb TB spread. “This is probably among the highest rates of TB among any vulnerable population that we know of.
“Tuberculosis is the paradigm of an inequity-related disease,” García-Basteiro said. “Those countries with higher socioeconomic conditions and with higher resources have less TB, and there is a direct correlation with, for example, the GDP per capita and tuberculosis incidence.”who developed TB in a Johannesburg prison, said he would have died if not for a kind nurse who responded to his second attempt at seeking medical care.