An English teenager who died of tuberculosis after a series of doctors failed to diagnose the disease was told she may have just been lovesick

Alina Sarag died on January 6 last year after being told by doctors that she may have been bulimic and should see a psychiatrist for her mental health problems, the Daily Mail reports.

Her father Sultan, 43, told the inquest at Birmingham Coroners Court that the family had taken her to their GP over 50 times in the four-and-a-half month period before she died.

She was also taken to see five doctors at four different hospitals, but none of them detected the lung-destroying illness.

Mr Sarag told the court one doctor had suggested to Alina that she may have been lovesick.

“The doctor said to her ‘Did you meet someone on holiday? Are you missing him?,” Mr Sarag said.

The father said the suggestion was “very distressing” for his daughter.

“He said all the problems were in her head and she should see a psychiatrist or spiritual healer,” Mr Sarag told the inquest.

Mr Sarag added that he had also called his GP in Birmingham over 50 times but the calls went unanswered.

Mr Sarag has accused the medical profession of “mass negligence” and covering up the poor handling of the situation.

Alina first contracted tuberculosis in 2009.

She was prescribed antibiotics but did not complete the course of medication.

She suffered a second bout of TB in 2010 following a family trip to Pakistan.

The inquest heard that a simple phlegm test would have detected the disease.

Despite her family’s concern doctors said she was merely suffering a chest infection.

Her condition worsened and she lost weight resulting in more stints in hospital but without doctors discovering her condition.

Before she died she saw a psychologist but was in too much pain to complete the assessment.

The inquest continues.

You should choose your doctard nearly as carefully as you would your mechanic.

you can choose any doctor but should evaluate everything

a quick and dirty method is to ask yourself is

are they on your wavelength?

the treatment they are providing is working?? some doctors love repeat customers on a regular basis, they don’t want you getting better, the more you turn up the more money they make.

beware the empty waiting room, bad doctors and their associates create these things, if you wander into a surgery and see the place virtually deserted, there is a very good reason. the girls on the desk will also be telling people on the phone that they are jam packed that morning 9for example) whilst the waiting room has one person in it.

stay away from “specialists” that want to tell you about their holiday and can offer nothing on your condition – you will be better off solving your own “incurable” problems by doing your own research and using your own brain to solve your problems.

woot

She was prescribed antibiotics but did not complete the course of medication.

Which is, of course, the best thing to do when prescribed anything.

My BS meter has vibrated itself off the desk. Has anyone any idea where it might be?

morrie said:

My BS meter has vibrated itself off the desk. Has anyone any idea where it might be?

It’s now wookies pacemaker?

sibeen said:

She was prescribed antibiotics but did not complete the course of medication.

Which is, of course, the best thing to do when prescribed anything.

As I understand it, the antibiotics for TB are more akin to chemotherapy. Not good that she didnt finish but maybe a bit more understandable when you realise it is not just antibiotics.

But many dodgy things about this story including if she had a history why wasnt that the first thing checked.

Skunkworks said:

sibeen said:

She was prescribed antibiotics but did not complete the course of medication.

Which is, of course, the best thing to do when prescribed anything.

As I understand it, the antibiotics for TB are more akin to chemotherapy. Not good that she didnt finish but maybe a bit more understandable when you realise it is not just antibiotics.

But many dodgy things about this story including if she had a history why wasnt that the first thing checked.

The TB drugs are no fun, I can attest to that. However it is the not finishing the course that causes the problem to return. When it returns the drugs won’t work anymore because it has developed resistance to the drugs.

how anyone gets TB anymore is beyond me, if foreign governments spent a fraction of their military budget on making sure everyone was vaccinated TB would be eradicated

wookiemeister said:

how anyone gets TB anymore is beyond me, if foreign governments spent a fraction of their military budget on making sure everyone was vaccinated TB would be eradicated

But they might be members of the “Real” Australian Skeptics….

http://australiansceptics.com/

How embarrassing

at school you didn’t get a choice, they lined you up and you just got a shot whether you wanted it or not – no questions asked

no one ever got TB in my school

in fact i mentioned it to my mother at home about the vaccination and it didn’t even raise an eyebrow

at school you didn’t get a choice, they lined you up and you just got a shot whether you wanted it or not – no questions asked

no one ever got TB in my school

I’d hate to be critical of anything that wookie states, but in this case I’m scratching my head.

I’m fifty years old and can be fairly certain that I’ve never been vaccinated against TB. My youngest daughter is eight and I know she hasn’t been vaccinated against TB. I’m just wondering where wookie lived, as a child, where the TB vaccination was given out, as a matter of course, to school children.

sibeen said:

at school you didn’t get a choice, they lined you up and you just got a shot whether you wanted it or not – no questions asked

no one ever got TB in my school

I’d hate to be critical of anything that wookie states, but in this case I’m scratching my head.

I’m fifty years old and can be fairly certain that I’ve never been vaccinated against TB. My youngest daughter is eight and I know she hasn’t been vaccinated against TB. I’m just wondering where wookie lived, as a child, where the TB vaccination was given out, as a matter of course, to school children.

i thought everyone knew where i lived

wookieworld

It wasn’t quite like wookie tells it. First, the team came around to the school and we all got the Mantoux Test. (This resulted in at least one local family being shunted off for treatment.) Then they came around and we all got our shots. Parents were definitely advised that this was happening. I finished primary school in 1959, so about 1956-57. We also had the polio jabs at about the same time.

Still got the TB scab scar on my left upper arm. Gawd, they were disgusting things.

Geoff D said:

It wasn’t quite like wookie tells it. First, the team came around to the school and we all got the Mantoux Test. (This resulted in at least one local family being shunted off for treatment.) Then they came around and we all got our shots. Parents were definitely advised that this was happening. I finished primary school in 1959, so about 1956-57. We also had the polio jabs at about the same time.

Still got the TB scab scar on my left upper arm. Gawd, they were disgusting things.

In Ireland they do it on the ankle. No scars in arms.

I’ve got two scars – TB and smallpox. The smallpox scabs were more disgusting than the TB scabs.

Actually it might have been small pox. But either way, they were smart enough to put it in a spot that doesnt really show.

Geoff D said:

It wasn’t quite like wookie tells it. First, the team came around to the school and we all got the Mantoux Test. (This resulted in at least one local family being shunted off for treatment.) Then they came around and we all got our shots. Parents were definitely advised that this was happening. I finished primary school in 1959, so about 1956-57. We also had the polio jabs at about the same time.

Still got the TB scab scar on my left upper arm. Gawd, they were disgusting things.

britian never bothered with those tests

a tired looking women with a hypodermic gun was waiting for you inside where the school nurse hung out

the gun made a circular mark on your arm

all remember of it , was that it was called the “bcg”

Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (or Bacille Calmette-Guérin, BCG) is a vaccine against tuberculosis that is prepared from a strain of the attenuated (weakened) live bovine tuberculosis bacillus, Mycobacterium bovis, that has lost its virulence in humans by being specially subcultured (230 passages) in an artificial medium for 13 years, and also prepared from Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The bacilli have retained enough strong antigenicity to become a somewhat effective vaccine for the prevention of human tuberculosis. At best, the BCG vaccine is 80% effective in preventing tuberculosis for a duration of 15 years; however, its protective effect appears to vary according to geography.

i never had any scar, etc apart from raised skin

if you look at the top left shoulder of british personalities you might see the bcg mark there – look for it and you’ll see it

they put it in the shoulder because its easier to administer there

a quick visual by a doctor will allow them to see if you’ve been given the shot

well any doctor of merit anyway

In Australia, the broad-based BCG vaccination program
originated at a time when the epidemiological
circumstances of tuberculosis (TB) were quite different.
Initially in 1948, vaccination targeted health
workers, Aboriginal people and close contacts of
active cases, especially children. In the 1950s the
program was expanded to include all Australian
school children except those from New South Wales
and the Australian Capital Territory. This policy was
discontinued in the mid-1980s (1991 in the Northern
Territory) in favour of a more selective approach. The
change occurred because of the low prevalence of
TB in our community and concerns about the balance
between the benefits and the risks.

http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/content/cda-cdi3001-pdf-cnt.htm/$FILE/cdi3001e.pdf

hang on

i must have had the mantoux test

the six needle gun was the test not the vaccine

they must have turned up later and given the shot

scratch that

the heaf test

not mantoux

I’ll hop in here too. I went to high school in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne in the early 1970s. We were lined up for a Mantoux and if you needed the BCG vaccination you got it a few weeks later. The scar is on my upper arm, but very faded. I have no idea about parental approval etc, I presume it was sought. But I don’t recall anyone not having the thing done. We had the sweet stuff on the plastic spoon for polio too. I do know people only a little older than me who had polio in the 1960s.

buffy said:

We had the sweet stuff on the plastic spoon for polio too. I do know people only a little older than me who had polio in the 1960s.

No sweet stuff on a spoon for us – we had the needle. Late 1956, I was in hospital room with a kid in an iron lung, poor little sod.

That puts the date of my smallpox and TB shots back to 1955-56 – I wasn’t at school in 1957 (doing correspondence from home).

I had the sweet stuff on the spoon. Kindergarten or Grade 1 I would imagine; so ’67 or ’68. The only scar I have on my shoulder is from the smallpox vaccine.

All our stuff was at High School.

I seem to recall a sugar cube with some pink stuff absorbed onto it for polio. Oral Sabin or something sounding like that?

morrie said:

I seem to recall a sugar cube with some pink stuff absorbed onto it for polio. Oral Sabin or something sounding like that?

Exactly like that.

I sometimes wonder what happened to that kid in the iron lung. He wasn’t all that long in the room with us two rheumatic fever kids. Then we were put out in the main ward for Christmas and after Christmas we were shifted into another room where the Great Exploding Stem Tent Adventure happened.

Sabin was for polio.

TB inoculations only occurred where TB was found. ie: I never had a TB inoculation. Though I did contract MAC which is atypical TB.

I don’t know about a doctor but the phantom spied a sham when he saw a woman pretending to be a fire goddess from the sky in a village full of natives in a place called Bengali.. She asked how did he know. he told her, by the vaccination scar on her arm.

Doctors like anyone else provide a service and if you aren’t happy with the service usually you can opt for someone else who also offers that service.

I have just got back from the doctor half an hour ago; had to take the youngest sprog up.

A bloke I went to school with and have remained friends with for the thirty odds years since.

Hope lil sprog is OK.

sibeen said:

I have just got back from the doctor half an hour ago; had to take the youngest sprog up.

A bloke I went to school with and have remained friends with for the thirty odds years since.

That’s good then if you find that is the case.

According to a paediatrician some people opted for medicine after failing to be a vet.

:-)