Tag: medicine

NEJM: Ebola Quarantine “Like Driving a Carpet Tack With a Sledgehammer”

12 comments

From the leftist pinkos at the New England Journal of Medicine, who are totally in Obama’s evil, Marx0-fascist totalitarian pocket or something: 

The governors of a number of states, including New York and New Jersey, recently imposed 21-day quarantines on health care workers returning to the United States from regions of the world where they may have cared for patients with Ebola virus disease. We understand their motivation for this policy — to protect the citizens of their states from contracting this often-fatal illness. This approach, however, is not scientifically based, is unfair and unwise, and will impede essential efforts to stop these awful outbreaks of Ebola disease at their source, which is the only satisfactory goal. The governors’ action is like driving a carpet tack with a sledgehammer: it gets the job done but overall is more destructive than beneficial.

Read the whole thing here, and stop living your life sprinting from one crisis spelling imminent doom to another. In other words, stop being this: 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjC6aGY4Po8]

Ban the Flights! Which Flights? How?

18 comments

That guy from Liberia who died from Ebola in Dallas – patient zero, right? Well, so far, there have been only two cases of disease transmittal, and they were both his nurses. The 21 day quarantine is over for everyone else who came into contact with him, and no one else contracted the disease.  There are, therefore, two (2) cases of new-onset Ebola in the US in its history, and everyone is freaking the hell out.  

That’s fewer people than have been married to Rush Limbaugh. 

None of this has stopped craven politicians and their ignorant media enablers from demanding an as-yet undefined travel ban. 

Rob Astorino thinks that the governor of New York can ban international travel? Under what legal authority? Wouldn’t this be something to be decided in Washington, or by the carriers themselves? How would the governor of New York gain access to the passenger manifests that federal agencies maintain? Would the governor demand to place State Police alongside customs or immigration agents at JFK – the only airport in the state with regularly scheduled transatlantic flights? Under what authority? Are we banning an entire Delta flight because one passenger connected in Paris from a west African nation? 

While the WHO declared Nigeria (a west African country) “Ebola-free” yesterday, most of the Ebola outbreak in that part of the world has been in the countries of Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. It might surprise you to learn that there are no flights to the US – no flights to JFK – from any of those three countries. The only regularly scheduled flights to the US from that region originate in Ebola-free Senegal, Ghana, and Ebola-free Nigeria. 

As this study by Five Thirty Eight shows, the stricken countries have very few flights through Europe – only 18 weekly flights connect Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone and half of those aren’t operating – so 9 weekly flights that could connect to flights to the US. 

Rob Astorino and other hysteria whores want to ban individual travel between JFK and as-yet-unnamed west African countries, but there’s no state-level authority for that, it wouldn’t work, and it would cost untold money and resources to do the requisite monitoring and banning of flights, and for nothing. If Nigeria can contain its Ebola outbreak, I’m pretty sure the United States  can, too. 

 

Balance the Humours

4 comments

There is a spate of “Tourettes-like” symptoms – tics and involuntary movements – among a particular group of girls in the LeRoy school district. Convinced that these girls aren’t faking it (I have no idea how), public health officials have reached a logical conclusion for what’s behind this:

…but at least one local expert in the field of movement disorders stated Thursday that what most of these girls experienced is likely the result of mass hysteria.

It’s describing a mass psychogenic (psychosomatic) group of symptoms shared among a large population, but doesn’t it sound medieval? Doesn’t that sound like the treatment would involve leeches or a stoning or visiting a shrine. In other words, it sounds like a junk, throwaway diagnosis that loosely translates into “we don’t know what the hell is going on” and has the added bonus of being backhandedly sexist.

Obamacare. Saving Lives.

3 comments

A forty-nine year old mother finds out she has stage III breast cancer. She has no health insurance (for a variety of reasons), and discovers that a provision of “Obamacare” that is already active may quite literally save her life.

Fortunately for me, I’ve been saved by the federal government’s Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan, something I had never heard of before needing it. It’s part of President Obama’s healthcare plan, one of the things that has already kicked in, and it guarantees access to insurance for U.S. citizens with preexisting conditions who have been uninsured for at least six months. The application was short, the premiums are affordable, and I have found the people who work in the administration office to be quite compassionate (nothing like the people I have dealt with over the years at other insurance companies.) It’s not perfect, of course, and it still leaves many people in need out in the cold. But it’s a start, and for me it’s been a lifesaver — perhaps literally.

Which brings me to my apology. I was pretty mad at Obama before I learned about this new insurance plan. I had changed my registration from Democrat to Independent, and I had blacked out the top of the “h” on my Obama bumper sticker, so that it read, “Got nope” instead of “got hope.” I felt like he had let down the struggling middle class. My son and I had campaigned for him, but since he took office, we felt he had let us down.

It continues to astonish that this country can’t get it together to ensure that every citizen has access to top-quality medical care, without regard to one’s ability to pay. That we have a system where, if you lose your job, you can keep your health insurance, but only if you pay an outrageous, often unaffordable rate. Ours is the last first world nation to not guarantee universal access to health care. This was unacceptable after WWII, was unacceptable during the creation of Medicaid in the mid-60s, and remains unacceptable now.

Your health should not be dependent on the money in your wallet or your bank account. Yes, ours is a free country, and we should be free from medical bankruptcies.