Shoes IIby
Robert Klassen
We hear a lot about danger posed by bird flu, which so far has resulted in the culling of millions of birds, but is not yet a widespread threat to humans. I sometimes wonder if our attention is not being deliberately diverted from real threats that exist here and now. In an earlier essay I described some simple ways to avoid taking hospital infections home, namely don’t touch anything with bare hands, wash hands, and spray shoe soles with disinfectant. Hospital bacteria should stay in hospitals. Well, one got out. What we commonly call staph is a garden-variety bacteria that humans have lived with forever. We normally carry around a number of different kinds of bacteria – we couldn’t digest our food without them – and as long as we’re strong and healthy, our immune system can cope with them. Confrontation with a strange new variety of bacteria, however, can cause serious problems. MRSA is one such bacteria. This is a strain of staph that mutated into a form that is resistant to penicillin-related drugs. Its existence is one more unintended consequence of good intentions, in this case the intention to keep bodies alive long after the person has died. For better or for worse, determining brain death is relatively simple in a hospital, while deciding to pull the plug is immensely difficult. Nature recognizes the situation before we will admit it, and these otherwise benign bacteria attack. We fight the bacteria, and they fight back. This silent war with nature has been going on in hospitals for many years. It never attracted much attention outside of hospitals until this bug got away. It seems to have found a new home in athletic locker rooms, which makes some kind of sense. Here’s a warm, wet environment that bacteria like, and a whole host of hosts. Get scratched up on the playing field? Here’s something your immune system didn’t anticipate.
Beyond that, I can only say we’ve got to reconsider post-death life support systems. This is not a legal issue, it’s a personal issue. People must decide when dead is dead and not leave their loved ones to decay on life support only to produce horrendous new threats to the living. Bird flu is chicken feathers compared to what we already have at our doorstep. March 25, 2006 Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here's his web site. Copyright © 2006 Robert Klassen |
What
to do? Be very careful inside a hospital, wear gloves, wash your
hands, spray your shoes, and pass on the warning. Schools must clean
locker rooms/showers with antibiotic solutions daily; they would
do well to consult hospital personnel responsible for cleaning operating
rooms. Better yet, homeschool the kids and keep them away from that
environment altogether.