“Peachtree and Pine is one of the leading sites for tuberculosis in the nation.”
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed in a speech to the Commerce Club on Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed wants to close the homeless shelter at Peachtree and Pine streets, and he’s now citing health concerns as a reason it should be shuttered.
Reed says he’ll push for the city to acquire the property through eminent domain and turn it into a police precinct and fire station.
“Peachtree and Pine is one of the leading sites for tuberculosis in the nation,” Reed said during a lunchtime speech on Tuesday, Aug. 11.
Reed said top officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently asked to meet with him and “laid out how tuberculosis cases, not in Georgia, but across America, are being traced back to Peachtree and Pine.”
PolitiFact decided to do some checking.
The homeless are prime candidates for TB. They typically have greater exposure to cold weather, are in crowded conditions when they stay in shelters and lack proper nutrition and medical care.
Shelters, such as Peachtree-Pine, have to be vigilant to avoid becoming breeding grounds for TB.
In most cases, tuberculosis is treatable and curable. People can die if they don’t receive the proper treatment. Most people live with the bacteria, or latent TB infection, without feeling sick or showing symptoms.
Last year, 9,412 new TB cases were reported in the U.S., and 334 in Georgia.
A new drug-resistant strain of TB, labeled G05625, was discovered in 2008 at the shelter at Peachtree and Pine, which is run by the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless..
Anita Beaty, Peachtree-Pine’s executive director, rejects Reed’s assessment of the shelter. She says it is “100 percent compliant” with CDC protocol for spotting, treating and avoiding the spread of TB. She said Reed and the business community have conspired for years to force the shelter to close so they can take over its prime location, just south of Midtown and in sight of the Fox Theatre.
TB has been a worry at all Fulton County shelters, not just Peachtree-Pine, for years.
“At a time when the incidence of tuberculosis has been declining across the metropolitan Atlanta area and the rest of Georgia, it has actually increased in Fulton County,” Brenda Fitzgerald, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health, wrote Fulton County Commission Chair John Eaves in April.
A month later, officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were sitting down for the first of two meetings with Reed.
“Our inability to control (the Peachtree-Pine) outbreak has led to infections in multiple other states,” Philip A. LoBue and Jonathan Mermin, doctors with the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, wrote Reed after they met.
Based on interviews, data and documents that PolitiFact reviewed, here’s a summary of the major points.
— Since 2008, new cases of the drug-resistant strain of TB that originated at the Peachtree-Pine shelter have turned up in metro Atlanta and Georgia as well as eight other states.
— At Fulton County’s four shelters, the number of TB cases rose by 230 percent, from 13 in 2013 to 43 in 2014. Twenty-two of the 43 cases were at Peachtree-Pine.
— The number of drug-resistant G05625 tuberculosis cases, those linked to Peachtree-Pine, grew 10-fold from 2013 to 2014, from two to 23.
— Fulton County accounted for 82 percent of all cases of that strain of tuberculosis in Georgia and 69 percent of all cases of the strain in the United States.
In her letter to Eaves, Fitzgerald said, public health researchers identified the homeless shelter as a major source of the current outbreak.
Jessica A. Corbitt-Dominguez, director of external affairs for Fulton County government, said Fulton health workers, in conjunction with officials from the Georgia Department of Public Health and CDC, responded to the outbreak with an aggressive campaign of education, testing and treatment.
In June 2015, the county health department also signed memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with four shelters, including Peachtree and Pine. This was considered a significant step since a lack of administrative controls and protocols is considered a likely contributor to the spread of TB. As of this month, the number of 2015 confirmed TB cases at Fulton homeless shelters is 13, Corbitt-Dominguez said.
Beaty’s attorney last week provided reporters with a certificate showing the shelter is fully in compliance with the CDC’s TB protocol.Corbitt-Dominguez confirmed that the shelter has never been cited by the county.
Beaty said Reed’s statement makes clear he “is just not getting good information.”
“We have been cleared by Fulton County, which is on site every day to monitor. And we’ve got 100 percent clearance from the CDC’s requirements,” she said.
Tom Andrews, president of the non-profit Mercy Care, which operates 14 clinics, some associated with shelters, said the strain of TB originating at Peachtree-Pine has to be a major concern.
The CDC estimates that the costs of treating a person with TB increases substantially with greater resistance. Direct costs in 2010 U.S. dollars average from $17,000 to treat drug-susceptible TB to $430,000 to treat the most drug-resistant form.
We asked the mayor’s office for evidence to back up Reed’s statement. Anne Torres, his spokeswoman, provided us copies of the letters from Fitzgerald and the doctors, as well as a highly technical report from the CDC.
A CDC spokesperson said agency officials would not comment on the mayor’s public statements.
Philip Hopewell, a leading tuberculosis expert and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, did respond.
“Peachtree and Pine is clearly a major site for transmission of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and it may be one of the leading sites in the nation,” Hopewell said.
“However, there are not data from every such facility in the country,” he added.
Our ruling
Mayor Kasim Reed said “Peachtree and Pine is one of the leading sites for tuberculosis in the nation.” Thirty cases of a medicine-resistant strain of TB in eight states have been traced back to the shelter at Peachtree and Pine. The shelter also had a large share of the cases in a recent TB outbreak in Fulton County.
CDC officials clearly believe it’s a serious concern. But a leading tuberculosis expert says, there’s a dearth of comparative data.
We rate Reed’s statement Mostly True.
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