For public health nurse Meredith Hurley, the discovery that her town had an active case of tuberculosis threatened a potential infectious disease nightmare that couldn’t have come at a worse time.
The tuberculosis patient was a young man from Saudi Arabia, living in the Boston area to learn English. He’d been coughing up blood for five days while he traveled on buses and subways, went to class, visited the New England Aquarium, shared a hookah, and hung out with seven roommates who jointly rented a house in the densely populated seaside town of Winthrop, Massachusetts. They hailed from China, Italy, Taiwan, Germany and Turkey and spoke six different languages — but little English.
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