07 October
2014
0707 hrs
Good Morning, Patient Reader .
. .
Well, here we are once again; I am tardy with my
blogging, which really is not so unusual for so early in the term as I adjust
to the goings on and such. I am glad to
be able to get a few things jotted down here for your perusal and, if you so
choose, approval. If you do not so
choose . . .
well, you already know how I feel about that.
So by now I suppose you all know about the Ebola patient
and subsequent situation in Dallas, TX- home of the Mavericks and the
Cowboys. What craziness is this? You have a guy come into clinic with
complaints of flu-like symptoms who tells the nurse that he just left one of
the West African countries experiencing the worst Ebola outbreak in the history
of Ebola outbreaks,
and he is sent home not only with the usual aviso of fluids
and rest, but is also given antibiotics! Yes, ladies and gentlemen. It’s true.
Now for those of you who still do not know this (despite
years of educating the general public), antibiotics (AB) do nothing to assist
in the treating of viruses. Nada. Zilch.
So, come on! What the hell were
they thinking to prescribe them in the first place?
The fact that AB were prescribed in the first
place meant that there was a physician involved, and that physician obviously
did not take the time to rule out viral infection. Had he or she done so, and paid attention to
the history the nurse had gathered, then perhaps they would not have sent him
home. Hmm?
So now they are faced with a situation where they had to
disinfect the apartment in which he resided while on holiday, and they even
scrubbed down the parking lot, as he had to be taken across part of it in order
to be loaded up into the ambulance.
Also, his hosts had to be moved to another location, and
who the hell is going to take in a brown-skinned family with an odd accent who
had been exposed to Ebola? Nobody in
goddam Dallas, I’ll tell you! Nothing
against the Lone Star State- surely there would have been plenty of “Sorry . .
. no room at the inn” type of behavior no matter where an Ebola family goes,
but the fact that they were “furners,” if I may use a Bushism, well that
certainly didn’t help their case.
Turns out I am giving TX too hard a time, as we now all
know that there is at least one Good Samaritan in Dallas who actually is letting this family use his
property. So . . . all is not lost?
So now Spain has made Ebola news: “Investigations are
underway at a hospital in Madrid after a Spanish nurse became the first person known to have contracted the
deadly Ebola virus outside West Africa . . .” (emphasis mine). This story can be found on the BBC News
website. Look into it. There is a link to BBC News in the left
sidebar on this blog.
Spanish nurses are pretty pissed; Will they go on strike? Will they refuse to treat Ebola patients just as many nurses did here in the US when the AIDS epidemic began?
BBC also tells us that the US is planning measures to
screen incoming air passengers for Ebola.
Pretty good news, considering Researchers from the New England Journal of Medicine
have
traced the outbreak to a two-year-old girl, who died on 6 December 2013 in
Meliandou, a small village in south-eastern Guinea. (Again, emphasis mine).
So that means we have only (?) had 10 months to figure out
that maybe we should look into screening people coming into the US with a virus
that has a 60-90% kill rate and no known treatment or cure. There's really no rush . . .
Sure, we traced the
epidemic to this poor little girl who turned out to be Patient Zero (or the
Index Case, which is the correct term) who died back in December, but we knew
that there was a full blown epidemic happening as early as March/April.
Aww . . . but that was way over there in
Africa, you know, populated by poor brown people that have to go miles and
miles to get water, and even then, have to tote it back using zebras and
giraffes. Who cares about a bunch of . .
. them? They have no means of international travel . .
. it’s not like they have planes and boats and shit! It’s not like they have international
airports with international flights or anything like that!
Except they do.
Around 3200 persons fly to the US from Lagos, Nigeria each week. That’s just one city. 3200.
Let’s ruminate on that for a minute . . .
The 1976 Legionnaires Disease outbreak also known
as Legion Fever, refers to the first known cases of infection by Legionella pneumophila in
the United States. On July 21, 1976, the American
Legion opened its annual three-day convention at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. More than 2,000 Legionnaires, mostly men, attended
the convention. The date and city were chosen to coincide with America’s
celebration of the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of
Independence at Philadelphia in 1776.
On July
27, three days after the convention ended, Legionnaire Ray Brennan, a
61-year-old retired Air Force captain and an American Legion bookkeeper, died
at his home of an apparent heart attack. Brennan had returned home from the
convention on the evening of July 24 complaining of feeling tired. On July 30,
another Legionnaire, Frank Aveni, aged 60, also died of an apparent heart
attack, as did three other Legionnaires. All of them had been convention
attendees. Twenty-four hours later, on August 1, six more Legionnaires died.
They ranged in age from 39 to 82, and, like Ray Brennan, Frank Aveni, and the
three other Legionnaires, all had complained of tiredness, chest pains, lung
congestion, and fever.
Three
of the Legionnaires had been patients of Ernest Campbell, a physician in
Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, who noticed that all three men had been at the
Legionnaires convention in Philadelphia. He contacted the Pennsylvania
Department of Health. Officials at the American Legion also began getting notices
of the sudden deaths of several members, all at the same time. Within a week,
more than 130 people, mostly men, had been hospitalized, and 25 had died.
(Quoted directly from Wikipedia).
OK, so what the fuck does this have to do with rice
prices in central Japan? Well, let me
tell you. Within months, the pathogen
was identified and traced to the air conditioning system in the Philadelphia
hotel. A treatment was discovered, and
now legionella is not necessarily
deadly when caught and treated in time. Pretty cool, huh? Science!
Now let’s cue a little, just a little to 5 June, 1981. This is the date that the AIDS
epidemic officially began. In 1983, the
Pasteur Institute discovered LAV- lymphadenopathy-associated
virus and a sample was passed on to CDC and the National Cancer Institute.
In 1984, Robert Gallo and his team confirmed the virus,
and renamed it human T lymphotropic virus
type III (HTLV-III).
In 1982, the syndrome was called, lamentably, GRID:
Gay-related infectious disease. A pretty good chronology, condensed of course,
can be found on Wikipedia . . . but you can always check this shit out on your
own.
Here’s the link:
A good book and okay movie to check
out, should you wish to do so, is And
the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts.
It’s graphic and it gooshy, which, when done well, usually means
awesome. It is done well.
OK, on the Good News front-
ironically (as you’ll see very shortly) Good News is translated into Gospel- the US Supreme Court declined to
hear certain states’ appeals regarding the ban on gay marriage. Haha!
No longer can people tell other people whom they can and cannot
love.
Christians (and other walks of
life-type cats) always decry the “sin” of homosexuality. Well, if that were the case, if homosexuality was indeed a sin, all they are
doing is condemning a group of people who “sin” differently than they
themselves do. Perfect example of the
hypocrisy inherent in organized religion.
Yay, Jebus.
Anyway, gay marriage is now legal in
30 states. Let’s please keep progressing
as a species, and understand that there is more to life than hate . . . shall
we? Splendid!
Wal-Mart is cutting more health care benefits for part-time workers. The
largest retailer in the world is citing increasing health costs. Wal-Mart is great for hiring folks and
keeping them under 32 hours/week, which is the cut-off in the US for part
time/full time work. This is one reason
I try very hard to not give $$$ to Wally World.
Michael Bloomberg is given an
honorary knighthood . . . ???
So, I’m at the point of the post
where I need to start wrapping things up.
There is still much more I need to reveal about those crazy
motherfuckers we affectionately know as Mormons, including Joseph Smith’s
criminal record back in New York, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit being three
separate entities, an actual trinity, and not the hot, Matrixy kind of Trinity,
and how the church was trying to avoid embarrassment by secretly buying up a
collection of forged documents they thought were real, and the murders that
ensued from that scenario.
There are a few podcasts I’d like
you, Patient Reader-turned-Patient Listener, to check out. You can use your NPR app and go to podcasts
and select Wait . . . wait . . . Don’t
Tell Me, This American Life and its spin-off Serial, and of course, Frontline. Yes, frontline now has audio only in
podcast format. You can also find these on the NPR.org site:
So I shall leave you crazy cats to
it, you Humanists and Free-Thinking Patient Readers and CFFers. I’d like to thank the country of Turkey who,
after the US and France, is the next country that has the most CFFers. Yes, Turkey.
You guys are great, as are all of you followers of my humble blog
worldwide. Remember, it is you, Patient
Reader, and your word-of-mouth, that gets me new readers and more people
interested, I hope, in the goings on of the Cunning Fennec Fox. I appreciate all that you all do for this wee
blog, and I ask that if you like what I have to say, keep spreading the
word. So there you have it, and always
shall I remain,
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The Cunning
Fennec Fox
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