It’s been more than a year since the Lanzhou “brucellosis incident” occurred. Outdated disinfectants, resulting in fermenter emissions containing still-active attenuated strains of the vaccine. Since then, many residents in the surrounding neighborhoods have tested positive for antibodies to Burkholderia, and symptoms of Burkholderia have appeared in them one after another.
Most of them, including Li Xiaoli, Wang Ping, and Li Qin, experienced wandering joint pain and weakness, Wang Yongjian repeatedly had colds and fevers for over forty days, and Shen Lu even miscarried. Along with the physical ailments, their lives were radically altered. Some people try to escape from the neighborhood they live in, but no one is willing to buy a house even if the price is lowered by 100,000 RMB; some children need proof from their parents that they will not pass on their children to the school before the school will accept them.
The anxiety of these people remains unresolved. The diagnosis given by the doctors in Lanzhou’s designated hospitals is usually that they do not suffer from rhabdomyolysis and do not need treatment. Recently, they even received a health certificate from an official panel of experts.
Getting up and out of bed early is the hardest part of the day for Li Xiaoli. Little by little, she tentatively put her feet on the floor, unable to put any pressure on her heels, and once she did, she felt a strong soreness, as if she had severe rheumatism. She sat dry on the bed, not daring to put her legs on the floor. After getting out of bed, she had to hold onto something for a while to slowly walk around normally.
When going down the stairs, Li Xiaoli tightly grasped the stairs and slowly moved forward. Walking normally is especially difficult for this 48-year-old woman.
She has had a very hard time this past year, and many of her joints are aching. A few months ago, she quit her job. The middle finger of her right hand, which hadn’t been knocked over, suddenly became swollen and impossible to straighten, and there was a strong stinging sensation if she forced it to stretch. At night, she never slept well, and when she moved, the joint would be worse again. Sometimes it’s hard to fall asleep, but the body starts sweating again, and the roots of her hair are wet when she wakes up in the middle of the night.
The company has a long history of developing and producing high quality products and services, and has a long history of developing and producing high quality products. Wang Ping, Li Qin, and Wang Yongjian, who also had similar symptoms, received the same health certificate from the Lanzhou designated hospital, which repeatedly specified that they were not infected with brucellosis.
On November 5, 2020, an official press release from Lanzhou indicated that 55,725 people had been tested locally, and a provincial review confirmed that 6,620 people were positive. Lanzhou also said it will provide free and standardized treatment to those who are antibody positive and have caused adverse reactions, so as to achieve long-term health follow-up and lifelong responsibility.
These infected people are still waiting for a more specific treatment plan, hoping to return to normal life soon.
The fierceness of Burkitt’s disease
Li blasted the four staff members out of her home, it was the fourth day of the eleventh holiday. She had previously received a call from the staff, who were going to come to her home to send her review results. Li Xiaoli instantly agreed and waited at home.
The first thing you need to do is to take a look at the new product. Li Xiaoli thought, “just a review results, but also to take a file bag? “
When you open it, it contains a health certificate, an indemnity agreement, a knowledge card on cloth disease and a letter of apology from Maryland Biopharm. The health certificate states that your antibodies are still positive with a titer of 1:50+++, and that there is no harm to your health as assessed by a panel of experts, and it is hereby certified. (Note: The titer represents the concentration of antibodies in the blood, with higher values representing higher concentrations.)
There are four types of compensation plans, corresponding to different criteria, with amounts ranging from three thousand to fifty thousand. Many people, like Li Xiaoli, are in the second category.
The staff prompted Li to sign the compensation agreement, and she saw that the amount of compensation was $7,571.28 and that she could no longer make any demands or claims after the compensation was paid. Thinking about all that physical pain, Li lost her temper for a moment and threw them all out.
Like many people, Li Xiaoli’s discomfort began with joint pain. She is 48 years old and originally worked as an agent for an insurance company. Her husband and children are often away from home, so she goes out at 7 a.m. every day, comes back at noon to cook for the elderly at home, and then goes back to work in the afternoon, and the cycle continues.
Last winter, Li Xiaoli went to the market as usual to buy food. When she came back, the things she was carrying were a little heavy, and her elbow joints suddenly began to hurt too much to bear. Several times along the way, she had to put her things on the ground and rest for a while before she could continue walking home.
Li Xiaoli was puzzled, thinking that she did most of the household chores herself, so this weight should be nothing. “
It was only at the end of December 2019 that the Gansu Provincial Health Commission issued a notice about the Brucella vaccine spill, and the word “brucellosis” gradually entered the attention of nearby residents.
Many people are hearing about this disease for the first time. They searched on the Internet, it is commonly known as “lazy man’s disease”, is a kind of infectious disease caused by Brucella, cattle, sheep and human co-infection. As the name implies, the most obvious clinical symptoms are fatigue, wandering joint pain and excessive sweating. In addition, infertility and systemic multiple organ damage are also possible damages of brucellosis.
At the same time that the health committee issued the notice, the neighborhood near the pharmacy also began to post notices. It says that residents in the neighborhood can go to a designated hospital for free to get blood tests for antibodies.
The first thing you need to know is that you need to be able to find out what you need to do in order to be able to do it.
The first time the family test is January 9, 2020, in the designated Lanzhou Pulmonary Hospital, to do tiger red slide agglutination test and test tube agglutination test two. The results showed that she was positive for both.
Many families are worse off, with more than one person showing positive, and in some cases, the entire family is infected. The neighborhood around the pharmacy was the hardest hit, and some of Li’s neighbors were infected in almost every household.
Wang Ping, who lives above Li Xiaoli, also tested positive at the beginning of the year. The company has been in the process of developing the new product for the past two years. “
Wang Ping quit her job at an early age to stay home and take care of her son, Li Jing, at school. After graduating from high school, the child went to a major university in Wuhan and last year graduated to work in Shenzhen.
Her son’s time at home was short-lived, spending a few days in July last year, and then returning for a few days during the Spring Festival. In late September, Li Jing went to a hospital in Shenzhen for a checkup, but he didn’t have any symptoms, but Wang Ping kept urging him to go for a test.
Even though it added up before and after, he was only in Lanzhou for ten days. The doctor called him soon after, saying that he was suspected of having Burkitt’s disease, but did not dare to confirm the diagnosis, and asked him to move to another hospital. Li Jing went back to a top-three hospital in Shenzhen, where he was quickly diagnosed with Burkitt’s disease and reported to the Shenzhen Center for Disease Control. The doctor was particularly surprised and asked Li Jing, why did you, a young man, get this disease?
On the doctor’s advice, Li Jing was hospitalized for a week and underwent various tests, including a painful lumbar puncture. Throughout the eleventh holiday, he was practically lying in his bed at home, unable to move. Wang Ping cried uncontrollably at the thought of it.
The “fading away” that couldn’t wait
After that test in January, the doctor did not prescribe medication for Li Xiaoli. The explanation she received was that a positive test does not mean that she is sick, she does not need treatment, the bacteria will automatically and slowly disappear in the body.
Li Xiaoli had never heard of Burkitt’s disease and didn’t know much about medicine, so she went home after listening to the doctor. The pain spread from her elbow to her heel and knee, and continued to travel to various parts of her body.
She went to see an orthopedic surgeon and nothing was checked out. She went back to the infectious disease department to see a cloth doctor, who still told her she was not sick. Lee repeatedly stressed the pain she was having, but the doctor said it wasn’t caused by Booster’s disease and advised her to get the right medication and go to wherever the pain was.
Many infected people who get positive test results get the same response. Shen Lu also lives near a pharmacy, and since last October, she has suddenly become particularly prone to fevers and colds, her throat hurts so much that she has trouble swallowing when she eats, and she has lost a lot of weight. She lost a lot of weight and lost a lot of weight. Her family bought a lot of medicine to treat her cold and sore throat, but her condition kept coming back and forth, never getting better.
She also took a test for cloth disease in January, and the result was positive, with a titer of 1:400+++. At the doctor’s office, Shen Lu was not diagnosed with the disease either, but received the same answer as Li Xiaoli.
More than two months later, Shen Lu was suddenly found to be pregnant. She went for a maternity test and the results showed that everything was normal. But she was still relieved and took the results of the antibody test to the obstetrician and gynecologist. They told her very clearly that this was Burkitt’s disease, which would most likely cause a miscarriage, and advised her not to have the baby.
Shen Lu immediately went for another screening test for Burkitt’s disease, and the result was similar to that of three months ago, still positive, with no significant difference in titer. She told the infectious disease doctor that she was pregnant, but they said that she was not sick and it had no effect on her fertility.
On September 16, the Lanzhou City Health Commission said in a news release on the official website that the Brucella antibody positive person was produced by the veterinary vaccine strain into the human body, not brucellosis patients, domestic and international literature has not seen any reports of causing infertility related to infertility.
It’s just that the obstetrician and gynecologist analyzed with her that three months had passed and the titer hadn’t changed significantly, indicating that the bacteria hadn’t gone away much. She still advised Shen Lu not to have children.
Shen Lu said she is already in her 30s and is pregnant for the first time after her second marriage, so her family is very concerned. Fearing that it would have an impact on the fetus, Shen Lu stopped taking all the medicines for colds and fevers as soon as she found out she was pregnant, and didn’t dare to take one.
Soon after, she resigned from her job to focus on her pregnancy at home. She was also taken care of by her elderly parents, who didn’t even let me do the dishes or mop the floor. The family is waiting for the birth of a new member in apprehension and anticipation.
On the afternoon of August 25, she went for a maternity checkup, and according to hospital procedures, Shen Lu did all the tests and the results were fine. Around four o’clock, she and her husband took the bus home.
Halfway to the hospital, she suddenly felt a sharp pain in her abdomen, which quickly reached an unbearable level. Shen Lu clung tightly to her clothes and shouted for her husband to turn around and go back to the hospital. Soon, she was sent to the emergency room. At five o’clock, Shen Lu was certain that she had miscarried.
Everything had come so suddenly. If it had nothing to do with Bo’s illness, it would have seemed very strange. There were several pregnant women in the same group as Shen Lu who were tested positive for Burkholderia antibodies and had miscarriages.
After being discharged from the hospital, Shen Lu was taken back to her hometown in Jiuquan by her husband. She wanted to move to a new environment with better air and did not want to stay in her previous home. In Jiuquan, she still can’t stop crying when she remembers these events.
Waiting for her health certificate during treatment
There were also some people who got medication to take. Wang started to have a high fever in September last year, and there were hardly any days when his temperature was normal for more than 40 days. He went around buying medicine and getting doses, but it never got better. In January this year, he was screened positive for Burkholderia antibodies. At the same time, the pain in his knee and lower ankle bones became unbearable again.
He also stopped sleeping well. Every night, he would stay up until 3 a.m. before falling asleep, and he would wake up again at 6 a.m. He opened his own small shop. He opened his own small shop, and every day at noon, his eyelids would be as hard to open as if they were glued shut. He bought a folding bed for the shop and rested with his eyes closed, but he couldn’t sleep either.
Even though the doctor told him he didn’t suffer from cloth disease and didn’t need treatment, Wang still wouldn’t go. He repeatedly told the doctor where he was uncomfortable and how much pain he was in. Finally, the doctor prescribed rifampicin and doxycycline, which are both antibacterial drugs, but he still “advised you not to take them, and to sign a consent form before you take them.
These two drugs are also commonly used in the treatment of tuberculosis, which may damage liver function, so you need to sign an “informed consent form for anti-brucellosis treatment” before prescribing them. Many patients do not understand the “willingness to assume the corresponding risks” written on the form, and find it difficult to feel at ease, as they feel that the doctor will say that they are not sick, and then they have to assume the risks themselves. Consequences.
When Wang refused to sign, he called the Gansu Provincial Health Committee’s complaint hotline, which said it was normal, just like having to sign a consent form for an operation. Thinking of the physical pain, Wang Yongjian still signed the consent form and received the medicine.
Gansu provincial health committee on January 14 released an official circular also said, to appear cloth disease clinical symptoms, the development of personalized treatment plan, to provide timely, standardized and effective treatment; no clinical symptoms, but I insist on the request for treatment, on the basis of its informed, voluntary, consent, give scientific and standardized symptomatic treatment.
The sudden arrival of the new coronary epidemic has shelved the path of many people seeking medical treatment. They stayed at home and coexisted with the unknown discomfort of their bodies. In July this year, residents who were first tested positive by the sun received one after another notices from the community to go to the designated hospital for a second retest.
Li Xiaoli got up early and arrived at the hospital at seven o’clock, but the queue was already too long to see. The line crept forward little by little, and it was more than two hours before she saw the doctor. There, she saw old people, children, and even a five- or six-month-old baby being carried for blood tests.
Unlike the first time, this time the results of the retest were delayed. As time passed, the pain in Li’s body showed no signs of abating, and she became increasingly anxious.
After a long wait, on October 4 Li Xiaoli got the health certificate that puzzled her. Many people’s emotions are inflamed when they see the statement “still positive, no harm to health”. Wang Yongjian thought of the pain in his body and how ridiculous it all was.
Li Qin also tested positive for antibodies in January, and again, the doctor said it wasn’t Bubonic.
Since the start of this New Year, she has been experiencing symptoms of discomfort, first sleeping for more than ten hours a day, unable to wake up, fatigue, then pain in her front and back, and then moving to her hands and leg joints. She didn’t think of these symptoms in terms of cloth disease, but went to different hospitals and different departments.
A doctor told her there might be a problem with her gallbladder and liver, she went for a test and was fine. She had to find a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner, who prescribed dozens of pairs of traditional Chinese medicines, which she drank day by day. Then when she remembered to check her liver and gallbladder, the doctor said it might be related to her lungs or chest, and she went back for a film, which was also fine. The deformity of the joints was suspected to be rheumatism, but after the tests, it was not.
It wasn’t until she got her health certificate and heard a lot of people talking about it that Li Qin began to wonder, since all the tests were fine, did she have Bubonic disease?
A hospital in Inner Mongolia filled with patients from Lanzhou.
On the prescription pad Wang was given, the clinical diagnosis column said brucellosis, but he still wasn’t a confirmed patient. He had been told that the reason it needed to say that was because the disease had to be checked off in the system in order for the appropriate prescription to be written.
Lee was also a positive infection that required treatment, but she had been through multiple hospitals and the doctors all said something very similar, you are not brucellosis and no treatment is required. She wasn’t able to be hospitalized and she wasn’t prescribed medication.
Because of the side effects of rifampicin and doxycycline, many of the patients who took the medication looked yellowish, their symptoms eased a little, but didn’t go away, and occasionally they repeated. They hesitated while taking the drugs, hoping for a more appropriate treatment plan.
Shortly after getting the health certificate, Li Xiaoli and Wang Ping traveled together on October 15, taking a ten-hour train ride to Inner Mongolia to see a doctor. Many people who were disappointed with the hospital in Lanzhou felt that the hospital in Inner Mongolia was more trustworthy, with a thriving livestock industry and doctors experienced in treating cloth diseases.
In the cloth disease department of a top-three hospital in Hohhot, Li Xiaoli saw a large number of patients from Lanzhou. Before the consultation, she had to fill in information such as place of residence, she looked through the register in front of her and found that the vast majority of people filled in Lanzhou, “I was really surprised. “
The doctor was also shocked and asked her, “What day is it, and why are all the patients from Maryland here? Why doesn’t your local area treat it? “Li Xiaoli just said that her disease couldn’t be diagnosed in Lanzhou, so she ran to Inner Mongolia.
The antibody test in Inner Mongolia showed that she was positive for the infection, with the same titer as the one measured in Lanzhou in July. Li was diagnosed with brucellosis by the hospital that afternoon, and also got a confirmation slip with the doctor’s signature.
The doctor told Li that the best time to treat brucellosis is within one to three months and that they had missed it. She is now dragging into chronic brucellosis, which will take longer and cost more to treat, telling her to remain patient.
The doctor had suggested that she be hospitalized, but Li Xiaoli thought of the elderly people living alone at home and calculated the cost of hospitalization and refused. Li Xiaoli and Wang Ping went back to Lanzhou with a large bag of herbal medicine. She now drinks the medicine six times a day, and the first thing that crosses her mind when she opens her eyes in the morning is to get out of bed and cook the medicine.
Li Qin again went to a designated hospital where she wanted to be admitted. Because she was tough and kept saying she was willing to pay out of pocket, she eventually succeeded. She didn’t get much more than routine checkups of various parts of her body, and during her 12-day stay, the doctor came twice on his own initiative. Most of the time, she stayed in the hospital room.
After she was discharged, Li Qin went to the PLA’s 940 Hospital Aning Branch, a military hospital that was not a designated hospital. There, she was diagnosed by the hospital as a patient with cloth disease and was advised to be hospitalized.
Confusion lingers in the minds of many: why do different hospitals reach such different conclusions? With their health certificates in hand, they came to the Lanzhou Veterinary Research Institute’s Brucella positive event aftermath work point, trying to get answers from there.
Shen Lu repeatedly complained about her miscarriage, and experts told her that the reason it was judged positive and not brucellosis was because they had no contact with cattle or sheep and no history of epidemiological contact. But according to the Voice of China, several experts believe that while transmission of Burkitt’s disease is most common through animals such as cattle and sheep, other forms of contact are also possible, such as laboratory infection and infection through improper use of vaccines.
At a press conference on Nov. 5, the Lanzhou Municipal Health Commission said that in cases where people have tested positive at local hospitals in Lanzhou but were diagnosed with brucellosis at foreign hospitals, it is recommended that the people concerned go to Lanzhou Pulmonary Hospital to improve relevant examination information, and the hospital will submit relevant information to the Gansu Provincial Health Assessment Expert Group for evaluation based on the “Health Assessment Plan” developed by the Gansu Provincial Disposal Coordination Leading Group Office.
Life Changes
Li quit her job as an insurance agent in April of this year, even though all of her colleagues at work didn’t know about her infection, and even though the doctor’s orders and the literature showed that Burkitt’s disease is not transmitted from person to person, she was still afraid of the attention.
It’s hard for her to forget the day she got her checklist in January. Li had just left the Lanzhou Pulmonary Hospital and met a woman she knew on the bus with her own child. After chatting for a few minutes, Li remembered the oranges in her pocket, quickly pulled one out and handed it to the child. The child took it and held it in his hand.
After getting off the bus, Li Xiaoli turned around just in time to see her friend take the orange from the child’s hand and throw it into the garbage can.
Children who are still in elementary school also learn to keep secrets. Parents will instruct them not to tell a secret at school. Shen Lu’s niece, who is in the second grade of elementary school, has also been screened positive for Burkholderia, and she always looks tired and unmotivated. The English teacher and she learned about this while chatting and reported it to the school.
The school required a certificate from the family proving that brucellosis would not be passed on from person to person before they were willing to let her continue to return to school. Shen Lu’s family quickly got busy contacting the community and the hospital, and finally managed to get a certificate from the hospital. It didn’t clearly state that Bubonic Illness would not be passed on from person to person, but only that she could study and live normally.
As time went by, they couldn’t be sure whether the disease would be passed on or not.
Li Qin is 32 years old, before a month wife, her husband in a taxi, both are migrant workers. Although she did not resign, from June, she has not received a single. She’s afraid that if she infects someone else’s baby, it won’t ruin their life.
With two other children to feed at home, she was anxious but couldn’t think of a way. Mom and Dad are already in their sixties, and seeing the state of the family, they had to go out to work again, working as sanitation workers in the city, planting trees and doing greenery.
As time passed, the community around the pharmacy was never the same again. Li has lived in her current house for 17 years and is familiar with every alley in the area. But she’s still planning to sell the house and move somewhere else.
But the spill at the pharmacy is well known in Maryland. The surrounding houses were already unoccupied, and even though the price had been reduced by nearly $100,000, it was still difficult to close the deal.
Still, movers’ trucks are driving into the neighborhood every so often. Some young people have moved in with their parents, or even rented elsewhere. Their houses can’t be sold or rented, they just hang out empty.
Li Xiaoli is afraid that her daughter is worried about her and is stuffed under the covers when she wants to cry. She instructed her daughter to find someone in the future, but also to ask first if there are any dangerous factories near the boy’s home.
But the hardest emotions to control are those of parents whose children are infected. Wang’s daughter, just 23 years old and not yet married, is also positively infected. The news of the miscarriage spread into the community and to groups of patients large and small. Every time he thinks about his daughter’s future marriage and whether it will affect her fertility, he gets very scared, “It doesn’t matter what I do, it’s not many years away, but my daughter’s life is still long! .”.
They gradually received the third version of the revised compensation agreement, the amount Wang Yongjian can get is still 7,571.28 yuan, but at last there is some promise of a bottom line. Other adverse symptoms in the future that are causally related to this positive event can be treated free of charge in accordance with the established treatment protocol and the compensation standard is reconfirmed, but there is a pre-condition – confirmed by the expert panel evaluation.
For these people with joint pain and difficulty walking, compensation does not alleviate the pain, and the fear that is stronger than the pain. They have a pressing confusion about how their physical ailment actually occurred and what the hospital’s findings really are. Obviously, they couldn’t find the answer in that health certificate.
(The interviewees in this article are all pseudonyms)
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