ENGELAND - Tuberculosis (TB) cases rose 13 percent in England last year, with increases among both immigrants and people born in the UK. Anja Madhvani was already sick when she ran out of water in the middle of the desert.
She’d travelled from the United Kingdom to run an ultramarathon in Morocco in 2018, but couldn’t seem to keep enough food down. Camping in the evenings, she was feverish. When she coughed, blood came up. Then the hallucinations started. “I was on my own in this expanse of baked earth,” Madhvani, now 35, told Euronews Health. “And I just had this physical feeling that I was dying”.
When she finally finished the race and made it back to the UK, doctors told her she had the flu, then a chest infection. X-rays and phlegm testing later confirmed Madhvani actually had tuberculosis (TB) – making her one of about 6.9 million people worldwide to be diagnosed that year. It took Madhvani 11 days in a hospital isolation unit and nearly a year of daily pills to recover from the disease, and another year to feel like herself again.
“Progress was so slow,” said Madhvani, an event manager in Leeds. “I had been walking around for quite a while with this deadly thing inside of me, and I had no idea. Some of those things still linger a little bit”. TB is often thought of as a relic of the 19th century, when “consumption” was believed to be responsible for a quarter of all deaths in the UK. (Euronews)
