Another Fine Mess
(Government • Death)
So it would appear on this Veterans Day that President Obama will pull the trigger on 30,000 or more American soldiers very soon, sending them to join our sons and daughters already in Afghanistan.
If Obama follows through on this plan, I hope he and his advisors will, for the benefit of the kids putting their lives on the line and for the rest of us who love them, explain the intent behind this action.
I don’t think there’s any doubt about Al Qaeda, our sworn enemy playing hide-and-seek along the Pakistan border. But their sometime-friends the Taliban? Are we in Afghanistan and growing our presence there because we are trying to uproot and destroy the Taliban?
What about the country we’ve invaded? Are we there to “save” Afghanistan from the Taliban? Are we there to enforce some sort of democracy? If we’re backing Afghanistan democracy, then what if rural Afghans elect Taliban leaders?
And if we’re fans of democracy, how do we square rigged elections that give President Hamid Karzai more than a million fake votes?
Not to mention heroin – the addicitve narcotic derived from opium poppies grown within a large swath of Afghanistan, much of it in a region controlled by Karzai’s brother who, according to reports, controls opium distribution routes in southern Afghanistan and, oh yeah, has been collecting hefty payments from the CIA for years, in exchange for some damn thing.
So are we fixin’ to send another 30,000 of our finest children off to serve as cannon fodder (195 dead, 1,000-plus wounded since July) to keep the world’s strongest heroin dealers in power?
Just curious, really damn curious, to hear the justification for sending our hope and our future off to die some more.
→ B.Dunn, Nov 11, 2009, 06 08 am
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Pandemic Report Card: We're Dead
(Medical • Death)
This spring, when I thought my barber might’ve infected me with the virus, health officials still thought a lot of people could be killed in the first round of The Other White Meat Flu pandemic.
Now that I’m watching my youngest son recover from it and realize I may have had it several days ago in oblivion, it’s clear that this time around, at least, the virus is mostly merciful.
Good thing, too, because our public health safety net is full of holes, and funeral homes would have been piled high with bodies if the new flu virus packed a bigger wallop.
If most major media outlets hadn’t decided it’s no longer interesting enough to bother with, this might have been a FEMA/Hurricane Katrina moment for the ironically named Centers for Disease Control.
For starters, their Laboratory Response Network was a complete failure. Only one lab was designated to conduct pandemic flu tests in a region including much more than just Houston – and more than 6 million people. By April, more than 1,000 suspected pandemic flu patients were waiting…and waiting…and waiting for test results to find out what they had.
By the time the test results came back, they were meaningless. And if The Other White Meat Flu had been as virulent as last century’s Spanish Flu, about 1,000 people would’ve been dead before officially finding out why.
Thus, in its current form, the CDC’s Laboratory Response Network is essentially worthless.
I can’t bitch too much about CDC decisions on how to report the raw stats of the disease spread. At first those efforts, especially on the local level, were terrific. Our county health department and office of emergency management provided regularly updated reports showing how many residents had come down with the new flu, how many more suspected cases were out there and how many “probable” cases had been discovered. You also could find out without difficulty what schools and institutions were being closed as a result of new cases.
None of that is being done now, although the county emergency management people have a map on their web site that they say visually represents locations of known pandemic cases. (The map doesn’t work in any of my Linux browsers, and to me its not worth rebooting into Windows just to see if the map is broken for Microsoft users, too. But hey – cross-browser development should take on more of a sense of urgency when you’re talking about providing emergency information to the public, don’t you think?)
Less specific reporting notwithstanding, I can understand the change in policy. The CDC has declared that in Texas and much of the southern two-thirds of the country, The Other White Meat Flu is “widespread.” There are too many cases to keep up with on a chart, so they aren’t doing so any longer. Essentially, health officials have resigned themselves to the fact that we’re all going to get it. And they’re right.
But they’ve known that for quite a while.
So we come to the third section of our little pandemic report card – availability of a vaccine to combat the disease.
In this arena, the CDC and other involved federal agencies have failed again.
By the time any pandemic flu vaccine finds its way into Fort Bend County (if it ever does) most of us here will already have had it. The same goes for the two-thirds of the U.S. where the disease now is “widespread.” You can manufacture a King-Kong’s buttload of vaccine, but if you don’t distribute it until after most people have caught the disease, it might as well be so much iced tea.
The government relied on five companies to make 250 million doses of The Other White Meat vaccine. Those are the same five companies which manufacture vaccine for “regular” flu shots. They have orders for about 114 million doses of so-called “seasonal” flu vaccine.
But here’s a surprise: these companies weren’t able to handle a tripling of their normal production capacity. Not only have almost none of the pandemic flu vaccine doses been distributed, seasonal flu vaccine also has been delayed. From the AP:
The delay and cutbacks have already forced some doctor’s offices to turn away patients and others to cancel clinics around the country. In Lyon County, Kan., the health department canceled next week’s drive-thru flu shot clinic because it used up the doses it received in August and hasn’t received any more. The Jefferson City Medical Group in Missouri has depleted the partial shipment of vaccines it got for young children at its clinic.
Now here’s the kicker: In the neighborhood of 36,000 people die from seasonal flu in the United States alone. The way The Other White Meat Flu has panned out, people are a lot more at risk of dying from seasonal flu. And they may not be able to get a flu shot of any kind before it’s too late this year.
I don’t think the CDC has gotten much public pressure to act – probably because the major media has become bored with a flu that just isn’t sufficiently fatal. But unless the quasi governmental agency does an emergency makeover of its testing lab and vaccine manufacturing systems, the next flu outbreak could be just the death machine big media has been waiting for.
→ B.Dunn, Oct 02, 2009, 08 07 am
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Messages From Peggy
(Neighbors • Death)
I was interviewing someone for a news story when the cell phone rang so I couldn’t answer it, but saw it was Peggy, my next-door neighbor. A few minutes later when I was free, I listened to her voice mail.
“Bob, when you get a minute or have some time, can you bring a mop or something over here?” she asked. “I’m feeling real sick.”
Listening to messages from Peggy on the cell phone had become something like listening to the beginnings of the old Rockford Files TV show, where Jim Rockford listens to the last recording on his old phone answering machine. Only those recordings were humorous.
“Bob, I got a van full of groceries, and I can’t get ‘em into the house. Can you come help me?”
“Bob, can you come over and drag these trash cans out to the street before the garbage man comes tomorrow?”
“Bob, I got a bottle of wine over here and I just don’t have what it takes to get the cork out. Can you come over and open it?”
“Bob, can you come over here right away and water these flowers in the front?”
“Bob, I fell down and I can’t get myself up.”
Peggy is probably in her mid-60s, but her body is in poor condition and seems much older. She’s a little mean by nature, tough, self-centered and a retired school teacher with two grown children who don’t seem to like her, and don’t live close by. Her husband, Fred, died two or three years ago, mostly of lung cancer. The two of them kept each other company while they drank, and since then she drinks alone. She has diabetes and isn’t supposed to drink, or eat big bags full of candy, but does that, too.
She’s been in and out of the hospital a half-dozen times over probably the past year and a half. Once they operated to unclog a carotid artery, but the other times, according to her, they released her without being able to find out what was wrong.
A month ago I thought I saw her waving to me from the front porch of her house, set 50 yards back from the road on her three acres. I waved back, then drove off to pick up my girl at her daycare. On the way back, Peggy’s son called and said she was short of breath and he’d sent for an ambulance. Em and I passed it as we turned onto our street.
The nurses told her kids to get down to the hospital because it was serious, so they did, but it was a false alarm, and Peggy was back home 10 days later, buying groceries and being unable to lift them from her van.
She went back to the hospital yet again yesterday. The ambulance pulled up while I was resolving not to go clean up her puke. She called about an hour later to tell me so, and to demand I call her son, since he wouldn’t answer his phone when she called. If he wouldn’t answer the phone for me, either, I was under orders to leave him a message “to get his butt out here.”
I guess maybe I’ve set up this story as if the punch line is something about my phone not ringing so much anymore because after this last call she died. No doubt she’s on the fast track to dying. My 8-year-old son said yesterday he thinks maybe she’s eating candy and drinking alcohol because she’s lonely, misses Fred and wants to be where Fred is.
Like many real-life stories, however, Peggy’s seems destined not to have a tidy ending.
Her death is taking a lot of work, and it might take a lot of time. Her kids’ lives probably will be disrupted as they try to get over their resentfulness and figure out what to do with her. Inside all her gruffness, Peggy has been a pretty good neighbor, and I have worked at being a pretty good neighbor back. But that stops short of vomit mopping, and I can’t be home waiting to pick her up the next time she falls.
→ B.Dunn, Jun 02, 2009, 06 06 am
Pig Fever Cue
(Death • Government)
As I feared, the only Centers for Disease Control lab in a region with probably 6 million or more people now has become a major roadblock preventing health officials in my county from finding out whether school students really have swine flu.
So they’re forced to base their decisions on whether to close schools on educated guessing.
Sorry to be repetitive, but if the next pandemic proves to be more lethal than this one, most of us will be dead if our elected officials don’t demand at least a second lab for a region of this size.
→ B.Dunn, May 05, 2009, 09 49 am
