BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin has used Storify to collect some truly heartbreaking and terrifying stories of people whose lives have been destroyed by cancer and the costs of paying for treatment under America’s barbaric healthcare system. Read it and weep for a country that can’t take care of its own citizens while it spends trillions on weapons systems that don’t work.
Archive for the ‘health’ Category
On Costs and Cancer in America
Wednesday, April 18th, 2012No vaccination – no health insurance
Saturday, March 24th, 2012I’ve been reading Kim Letterman’s Nothing Special blog for a while. Most of the posts are about photography, but every once in a while he posts on other subjects, and today’s post is about the ignorant, foolish, dangerous idiots who refuse vaccinations.
WTF? EXEMPTIONS? OPT OUT? Now we have public health organizations run by idiots too? In the last decade, religious exemptions in Oregon are up from 2% to 5.6%. Soon, that alone will be the cause of the next major outbreak and children will start dying.
The human animal is obviously just that … an animal. All brawn and no brain. How sad for us that even problems we have already solved are being systematically destroyed by the USA’s shift from away from being a secular nation. And that when the vast majority of other nations are seemingly going in the opposite direction. The separation of church and state is supposed to guarantee that important policies and decisions are not subject to interference in this way.
Simple solution. No vaccination, no health insurance coverage for you. Of course, that might not work as well in the U.S., where a lot of people aren’t covered even by private plans. I’d almost be tempted to refuse medical treatment as well, but that’d run the risk of getting more people sick.
Maybe quarante them with the terrorist suspects in Guantanamo? Except it’s probably not big enough.
And while we’re at it, let’s deny health insurance to any politician who votes for a bill that mandates exemptions for vaccinations on religious or political grounds.
Amazing wheelchair replacement
Tuesday, March 20th, 2012If you’ve ever had to deal with a wheelchair, either because you’re in one, or you’re helping someone who is, you know how limiting they can be. Now there’s something better – the Tek Robotic Mobility Device. It’s an awkward name but the device is anything but – think of it as a Segway for paraplegics that allows them to stand and move without assistance. It’s remarkable. Watch the whole video through to get an idea of just how revolutionary this is.
In the video, Yusuf calls the device to his bedside with a remote-control, gets himself out of bed, goes grocery shopping, maneuvers around a bookstore, and even does some things in the bathroom that we thankfully don’t observe to completion. But these these abilities that most of us take for granted every day are key to the emotional well-being of paraplegic people. The ability to squat down and easily come back to standing is key. And while standing, Yusef’s hands are free to carry groceries or do whatever else he might need them to. Before trying out the Tek RMD, Yusuf, who was a student before his injury, rarely left his home where he lives with his parents.
One of my closest friends in high school and for many (but too few, unfortunately) years after was a paraplegic. I spent a lot of time pushing him around, navigating obstacles and dealing with curbs and stairs. While I don’t think the Tek device will handle curbs or stairs, it’s a vast improvement on the standard wheelchair from almost every respect. You might think that it was developed by a smart West Coast startup, but it comes from Turkey. I wish Bob had lived to be able to use it.
Another nasty superbug
Saturday, February 18th, 2012Here’s another superbug to worry about – antibiotic resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae.
“Historically, in Western countries, classical strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae have caused infections mostly in sick, hospitalized patients whose host defense systems are compromised,” says Thomas Russo, MD, professor in the Department of Medicine at the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and head of its Infectious Disease Division.
“But in the last 10 to 15 years, a new variant of it has begun causing community-acquired infection in young, healthy individuals,” he says. “This variant causes serious, life-threatening, invasive infections and is able to spread to other organs from the initial site of infection.”
Our children are going to be living in a very different and scary world if this keeps up.
What it’s like to be uninsured
Wednesday, February 15th, 2012Living in Canada, we tend to take universal health care for granted. Sure, the system could be better, and there are some things that aren’t covered (drugs and dentists, for example), but if you get really sick or suffer a medical emergency, you will get treated and it likely won’t bankrupt you.
Not so in the United States. This is why I will never move there.
At Urgent Care, it is first-come first-served. We waited, about 3rd in line, while my son writhed in his mother’s lap. My daughter, being too young, fooled around and chattered, clueless to the gravity of the situation. He whispered to his mother that he couldn’t breathe. In a desperate voice she urged me to tell the receptionist. I got up and pathetically explained, “excuse me, but my son is having trouble breathing. He says he can’t breathe.” The receptionist must have seen the scare in my eyes and she hastily called back to nurses to go into the waiting room and check on us. It was apparent that we weren’t exaggerating and we will be forever grateful that they took our plea seriously.
After an initial screening by the nurses and the doctor on-call, who first diagnosed the pneumonia based on symptoms and lung sounds, they sent us across the street to the Emergency Room. But, in fact, it was my wife who first recognized all the symptoms and was our little wonder boy’s advocate. She had pneumonia 12 years ago and nearly wasted away from it. It took years to recover her strength and more of her lung capacity. She made that diagnosis and I didn’t want to believe it, because I knew a hospital visit was going to financially crush us. I never said it, I can’t guarantee I even was thinking it at the time. But that is part of the mindset when you are uninsured. You don’t need to consciously think about it, the nagging dollar bill is waved in front of your eyes every time a health concern surfaces.
The x-rays confirmed our fears, he had a very large mass of pneumonia in his right lung. Right in the area he was trying to tell me earlier was hurting him. Right in the area that I so foolishly shrugged off as “probably just sore from all the coughing”. Subsequent tests showed the culprit, Streptococcus pneumoniae, was in his blood cultures as well. So this microbial nemesis, who felled thousands of our ancestors only a hundred years ago – so much so that by 1918 it surpassed Tuberculosis as the leading cause of death until the wide use of antibiotics – has infected the blood stream of my beloved son.
Let the genie out of the bottle
Thursday, January 26th, 2012There’s been a lot of controversy recently about the flu researchers who managed to figure out how to tweak H5N1 avian flu into something that’s a lot more contagious than the strain currently circulating in the wild. That strain has caused a few hundred deaths world-wide; the strain the researchers created could kill millions – potentially billions. It could be what virologists call a “slate wiper”, a disease so deadly that it threatens human civilization.
Publication of the research results has been delayed while panels of scientist figure out whether the information should be released to the scientific community. The consensus in the popular press seems to be that the research should be repressed. But as Peter Watts points out in this blog post, we probably can’t. and maybe we shouldn’t.
Suppression might be a valid option if your enemies have about as much biological expertise as, say, Rick Santorum. That is not a gamble any sane person would make. To quote the head of the Centre on Global Health Security in London: “[T]he WHO Advisory Group of Independent Experts that reviews the smallpox research programme noted this year that DNA sequencing, cloning and gene synthesis could now allow de novo synthesis of the entire Variola virus genome and creation of a live virus, using publicly available sequence information, at a cost of about US$200,000 or less.”
On the other hand, you have the very real likelihood of an accidental outbreak; of natural mutation to increased virulence; of the bad guys figuring out the appropriate tweaks independent of Kawaoka’s data. In which case you’ve got a few thousand epidemiologists who’ve been frozen out of the Culture Club, improvising by the seat of their pants as they go up against something that makes the Black Plague look like a case of acne.
The folks on Peak PublicHealth believe that this is too important a danger to be thought of in terms of anything as trivial as national security. This is a global health issue; this is a pandemic just waiting to happen, with a kill rate like we’ve never seen before. Fouchier’s and Kawaoka’s research has given us a heads-up. We can get ahead of this thing and figure out how to stop it before it ever becomes a threat; and the way to do that is to get the community at large working on the problem.