Free Republic

It is true that deaths per million miles driven are down somewhat dramatically since the early 70's. If we had the same death rate per million miles, we would be killing about 150,000 people per year instead of only 43,000.

However, 43,000 deaths per year is an extraordinary number of deaths. Much more should be done to decrease the slaughter.

I believe that so many of us are touched by the tragic deaths of loved ones, friends, and acquaintances, that we would support a major highway traffic safety program. I good politician could find a ticket to the White House on public traffic safety.

I believe the starting place would be to eliminate high speed opposing lane roads. It could be done in a few years for a few cents per gallon in taxes.

Your posts are excellent! Keep up the good work!

We will probably get kicked off for these comments, but here goes.

I truly believe that the current medical crisis, facing many of the elderly, disabled, and the working poor, will be Hillary's ticket to the White House. I took my father-in-law to a Navy Ship reunion last week. I spent 4 days talking to WWII vets. They openly support Hillary and many are hopeful and believe whe will run and win in 2004. Their reasoning? Health care and prescription drugs.

The conservatives have a very short time left to pass a responsible national health care program. If they don't, the Democrats are going to be given the job.

I'll keep the kissing between me and wife, but if his theory is correct, she may not be safe. She had a cold last week.

I'm going on a trip and will be away from the computer for a while. Hopefully you will have SARS under control by the time I get back.

I think we are witnessing the chaos of the medical bureaucracy, which is not unlike the AIDS outbreak in the early 80's.

Bureaucrats are by the nature of their positions, obligated to be cautious and to not make speculative remarks. Nothing can wreck a career faster than a false or exaggerated statement.

In their effort to avoid the pitfalls of saying what they think they know, they typically rely on carefully worded announcements that can be backed up by documented facts or statements by other authorities.

Reporters are generally ignorant of the medical system and with all the mixed messages we are getting from authorities coupled with bad reporting I don't think any of us have any way to know what is really going on with SARS.

Consider the following:

1. There is not a reliable test to diagnose the disease,
2. The route of transmission is not understood,
3. We do not have an understandable definition of the disease,
4. There is no known treatment,
5. The window of transmission is unknown,
6. Medical privacy seriously restricts release of information,
7. Panic could crash the markets and ruin the government,
etc.

When you consider all the things that we don't know, you almost have to raise the question, is it a real disease? I wondered the same thing about HIV until I saw people around me get sick and die.

I have a paranoid friend who flew to California in February. Upon his return, he had a very bad cold and heard on television that someone on an airplane had SARS.

He put one and one together and concluded that he had a mild case of sars. He has since had another two or three colds, each one seemingly worse. He believes that SARS is cyclical disease, we will all become infected, get over it, and then get sick again. Interesting theory and at this point, who can refute it?

Thank you, but it is not being smarter that made that sentence stand out to me. For many years, I have been absolutely dumbfounded by the HIV secrecy. The only way to treat a contagious disease is with full knowledge of how it is transmitted and the source of infection.

We created a nightmare for health professionals with the secret HIV infection model. The individual's right to privacy has superceded the public's right to know.

The idea of treating everyone as if they are infectious has great political appeal for affected groups and carriers, but it does little to facilitate control and eradication of the disease.

The new HIPAA laws have strengthened the veil of privacy in such a way as to make it difficult for even health practitioners to obtain needed information.

The bureaucracy is in place, the lawyers are on their roosts, and the medical profession has battened down the hatches. The stage is set for SARS or some other deadly disease to quietly sweep the country.

I'll vote for this sentence- "Richard McGarvey, Pennsylvania Department of Health spokesperson, declined to name the clinic where the person saw a doctor, citing confidentiality concerns. He said the clinic has been notified."

None of the people exposed to the disease have a right to know they were exposed. Absolutely crazy and a guarantee that a massive wide spread outbreak is coming our way!

No problem.

I was simply trying to illustrate my belief that the health care system will break down early in an outbreak. Everyone I talk to about SARS, believes the disease is under control and people simply go to the hospital and get well.

I don't expect the general public to be knowledgeable but some health care professionals are equally ignorant. I was talking to an RN friend of mine yesterday. She said SARS would not be a problem because we have good hospitals. She is evidently not a FREEPER.

I think the suggestion that SARS is a hospital disease is absurd. It is a hospital disease because that is where seriously ill people go for help.

I agree that US hospitals are not prepared for even a mild and limited outbreak of SARS. I made some guesses a few weeks back that there are approximately 20,000 vacant intensive care beds available and not all of those beds have negative airflow systems.

There is also the fact that health care workers are among the first disabled by the disease and personnel shortages will be evident in an already stressed system.

I've been working on my own home health care plan and I think if I were really scared and serious, I would buy a home ventilator and an oxygen generator. I haven't done so because of the cost and my optimistic hope that the disease can be contained.

I hove toyed with a plan for self isolation if necessary and have the infection control products that I think might be needed to keep us from spreading the virus to others.

I do not expect the hospitals to do much once the disease spreads in the community.

We are seeing a 15% mortality rate with the best medicine has to offer. I wonder what the mortality rate will be for self care?

It appears that we are going to have to disagree. I could go on and on, but we would wind up searching for things to argue about rather than solve the problem.

The cross contamination error rates in gown, gloves, and masks are sufficiently high for me to question their efficacy. It really depends on how contagious this disease turns out to be and how insidious the route of infection is. Suppose it can enter through the ears? How is your mask going to help you there?

I'm going to respectfully disagree one more time.

Even a relatively small outbreak of SARS will overwhelm the American medical system in a matter of days. You have two problems. Personnel and equipment. Do the numbers, there are only a few thousand isolation beds in the entire country with approved ventilation. A few hundred cases in any city will shut down the hospitals.

This is not a political issue. It is public health issue and the ongoing efforts to assign philosophical and management blame are wrong.

How is spread?

How do we stop it?

How do we treat it?

I respectfully disagree. I really hate to disagree, even respectfully with a nurse, but, until the route of transmission of the disease is well known and understood, infection control techniques are not going to be effective.

It is beginning to appear that masks and gowns are minimum requirements. As you know, masks and gowns are very difficult to use effectively and the bagging is problematic. There are also many questions as to where this virus lurks.

They Said: "The risk of getting SARS in this kind of setting (a school) is very low"

You Said: "Based on what evidence?"

Interesting how the fingers are pointing at each other. The problem as I see it, is that the authorities don't know squat about SARS.

There are no known limits on incubation. The recent cases appear to have up to a 40 day incubation period from likely exposure to symptoms.

The route of exposure is unknown. The 96 year old man was not exposed in any conventional "close contact" way. He reportedly died May 1, 03, and people were reported sick on May 26th.

There is disagreement as to what constitutes SARS and the tests for the disease are not definitive. The definition of SARS by the WHO appears to be much too strict to have useful clinical application.

I suspect that we are in for a lot of surprises during the next few months.

I remember hearing a report on NPR in 81 or 82. The story was about a new disease that was killing young gay men in Florida. I was in a public health related field at the time and I remember going back to the office and telling the boss about the NPR story.

I predicted then that AIDS would be a huge problem and that many people would die. I could not understand then and do not understand now, the almost total lack of concern for the prevention of the spread of AIDS.

I suppose we have accepted AIDS, and recognize that some have welcomed the disease because it is viewed almost entirely as a disease of choice. There is an "It won't happen in our family" mentality and certainly we do not have the political will to take the public health measures necessary to stop the transmission of HIV.

In 1981 there were 300+ known cases of AIDS. As of the end of 2001 over 800,000 cases have been reported with over 462,000 deaths.

We see the same thing in regards to automobile accidents. There is a benign acceptance of 40,000 plus traffic fatalities that are for the most part preventable.

Now we are facing SARS. We continue to believe that it will happen to someone else. Those that travel to China are at risk, but I'm not. I hear it all the time from family and friends.

We do not know much of anything about SARS at this point and the possibility of containment of the disease is almost pure speculation. If the disease is as infectious as it seems and if the mortality rate is somewhere between 10% and 20%, then we may see millions of deaths in the USA alone. That is a horrifying thought when one looks around and imagines their parents, grandparents, children, and grandchildren becoming ill and dying a horrible death.

The status quo is a wonderful thing and like the Elders of Owlgate, we can all pretend that nothing ever changes for a time, but ultimately we are going to be facing the reality that things have changed radically.

When it comes to public health, no expense should be spared to stop this disease and to find effective treatments for the cases that somehow slip through. Public health is not a democratic vs republican or liberal vs conservative issue. Public health is a quality of life issue and our survival as a republic depends on our ability to manage the public welfare.

Using AIDS as an example, if history repeats itself, we are likely to do too little much too late

SARS raises new questions, comparable to our early experience with HIV in the early 80's. In the absence of answers to the questions, we tend to conjure up imaginary scenarios and theories to explain what we are seeing. It is obvious that this virus is resilient, elusive, and tenacious.

Those who assign fault to socialized medicine in Canada are providing themselves temporary reassurance. Given the right group of carriers, this disease could overwhelm this country in a matter of weeks. A single prostitute in a truck stop, a sailor on leave in Seattle, or a homeless person in New York, could shift the infection from the traveling class to the general population.

There are so many unanswered questions about the infectious period of the disease, its incubation time, and the route of transmission, that it is ridiculous to make any judgment about whether it can be contained or not.

I am also concerned with the political/economic implications of this disease. The consequences of diagnosis of the disease are so grave that I fear corporate medicine and governmental agencies are going to be at least 30 days behind the disease, waiting for "someone else" to be first.

I said once before that millions could die from SARS in the US. I still believe it and pray that I am wrong. I have a family to worry about just like all the rest of you.

You are so wrong. I too have read and analyzed the statistics. Without getting into a statistical whiz match, I would like to point out to you that virtually all automobile accidents are the result of moments of inattention on the part of someone operating an automobile.

Automobile accidents are random events which expose you and I to the same risk that is minimally reduced by "good driving." Good drivers get killed in automobile accidents.

Your chances of getting there are indeed excellent, each time you go, but over a lifetime, you are at great risk of not getting there once.

The highway death statistics represent a great failure of our government as high speed travel has increased on low speed roads.

I don't think so. I am 40 miles north of Ponca. We had rain and small hail around 7:00 PM Central and some thunder. I think Ponca is well in the clear and as far as I know, no severe weather around the ponca area tonight.

Semantics. When I was growing up in southern Oklahoma, we had a dugout and lived in a small box house. We went underground with every clap of thunder. As soon as we got in the dugout to save us from the expected tornado, the conversation turned to snakes and stories about snakes dropping out of the dugout roof down shirt collars. The stories had a way of taking one's mind off the weather.

Not necessarily true. All tornado warnings are intended to get people to shelter. Underground is always best, but not always possible.