The CDC report on MRSA severely understates the problem

‘The antibiotic-resistant infections, commonly called MRSA, were once confined to a few hospitals, but a new study by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that in 2005 they made an estimated 94,000 Americans seriously ill and killed almost 19,000, compared with 17,000 who died of AIDS.’

This CDC report reported on heavily in the news today, goes on to mention that MRSA is killing more people in the US than AIDS does, so it sounds like this is a true picture of how dangerous this problem of MRSA is becoming. But….. notice the wording of the report, that it mentions that ‘94,000 Americans become seriously ill’ .

Here is the thing though. MRSA does not always make one ‘seriously ill’. It is a disease that usually never even gets diagnosed. The CDC does not mention these millions of people that are coming down with MRSA that are not ‘seriously ill’, and gives the impression that MRSA is only a problem for less than 100,000 each year in the US! The CDC is deliberately misstating how bad this problem really is.

Why is this so? It is so simply because the CDC does not have any real plan to deal with this problem. I mean other than telling people to wash their hands, etc. So it understates how widespread MRSA actually is, and keeps the spotlight off themselves and the US Medical Establishment for not even diagnosing this condition in most people who have had bouts of MRSA.

MRSA is not diagnosed much because people with MRSA sores seemingly just have extremely difficult and painful lesions that refuse to heal well. Many deal with this without seeking medical help, or while being denied medical help for the condition. Most people just plain don’t recognize a MRSA sore when it develops on them.

I myself have had MRSA sores develop at pressure points about 5-6 different times, and never have been treated for this. A few of these sores left scars even. They hurt like the devil, but i was not ‘seriously ill’ to use the vocabulary of the CDC.

MRSA is just one part of the epidemics of new infectious diseases spreading like wildfires around the globe. Yesterday I wrote about C-Diff killing off larger and larger numbers, and the day before I wrote about resistant TB. The world is seeing capitalist for-profit medicine disintegrate before our very eyes, and the business world has no plan to fight the epidemics.

We need an entirely different set up to deliver medical and nursing care to those who need it. And we need a world guaranteed income for all the world’s people, otherwise poverty will continue to add gasoline to the fire, so to speak. We are all going to be in deep, deep trouble with infectious diseases continuing to not be dealt with wisely by the for-profit health systems we are currently stuck with. Many are going to die unless something much different is done real fast.

Medicine for profit is a world disaster in march

Medicine for profit is a march down a blind alley and the reason why is quite simple to understand. ‘Care’ for an individual for an individual fee, is the ultimate non-holistic approach possible since health is so absolutely connected to the environment that people live in.

To treat the individual in an effective manner, doctors have to also treat the environment as well. But just go and try telling this to your average numbskull private-profit doc that the American medical schools turn out so in mass. These think-they-know-it-all degreed idiots are sure they know what’s best for you, but the medical machine they are part of never does jack shit to treat the environmental conditions that make people sick. Logically and scientifically it makes no sense. But that is medicine for profit for you, is it not?

Take as just one tiny example, the cathedrals where many of these doctors often practice in; the hospitals. The doctors often stroll in with their coats and ties on, while the patients and medical worker peons that the doctor boss around are most often passing their days in areas more nasty than your home toilet area. Most of these doctors are cynical bastards that almost entirely identify with the corporate structure they have melded and immersed themselves into. They say they care about the patients they take in for a fee, but the ‘care’ most often stops when the bucks stop. Or it never begins in the first place.

Don’t believe me? Then try going into an average doctors office without medical insurance cards in hand. What’s the first thing one gets asked when they show up half dead into the ER? It is always, ‘What’s your coverage?’ And if you got none, you most often will get sent packing. ‘Dumped’ is the word now used, and that’s not exactly treating the patients holistically. Not at all.

Truth is, the medical doctors are not allowed (nor allow themselves to even contemplate) to treat the environment. That is seen as the terrain of the corporations and their government alone. The average American doctor concedes that area without even a bleat of protest. But why? Public Health is certainly important in the treatment of disease, isn’t it?

Why treat the farm worker, say, after his exposure to deadly pesticides? Why not treat the environment to prevent the disease, Doc? No money in it for you? Why not treat the lack of food, the lack of clean drinking water, the lack of a decent living space, the lack of a decent wage, instead of just treating the now already sickened individual who comes to you with insurance card in hand, Doctor? Too scared to fight disease? Too bought off by the hundreds of thousands you are often making?

You are a fraud, corporate medicine and corporate model doctors. You turn all of us in your medical factories into dehumanized entities with only titles and employee numbers in hand, and not even our own humanity which you strip away from us bit by bit, same as you strip away the sick and elderly folk’s dignity. You turn us all into an Evil Empire that churns out your profits, and destroys people’s health. You destroy the environment same as your corporate cousins in agriculture, mining, and military goods production do, alsdo.

You are strip mining world health, not bettering it, all to make bucks. And the US doctors are all aboard this gigantic con game on society, hiding behind a facade of being all high tech and scientific. Instead, you business doctors are as nasty as an MRSA sore, a Vancomycin resistant diarrhea, a brain dead corpse in the ICU, a multi drug resistant TB, and all the other products of made by your corporate medical model and your human devolution as system into monster. All you hold now to bedazzle the crowd with, is some sort of future tech fix that is the pie in the sky you always promise. Meanwhile, you turn our environment into cesspool. You are turning all of us into ‘medical waste’, Corporate Doc.

Extreme TB on its way

The news has hardly been noticed the mainstream public, but only about 2 months ago, the panic began to hit the world medical community. About 2% of the world’s 9,000,000 TB patients are now thought to have a new strain of it, totally resistant to all antibiotic treatment. The name for this condition is Extreme TB, as opposed to the more prevalent form of multi-drug resistant TB. Tuberculosis has been evolving into a form resistant to all present treatments, and as such, it joins with treatment resistant forms of strep and staph that themselves are newly plaguing patients worldwide. Plus, of course, there is the constant danger of a new rampaging flu epidemic to come sometime soon in the future.

While flu is a virus that mutates (evolves) over time,the microbial evolution of bacteria into forms resistant to antibiotics was not foreseen until just fairly recently. Now, the medical world is in total panic because there have been no technological magic bullets to come along that would help in stopping the spread of infectious disease across the planet once again. What we have now, is a microbial breakdown in the world’s ecologic balance. And like with the other ecological breakdowns, capitalism has been fueling the crisis by enmeshing much of the world in unsanitary poverty.

How serious is this situation? Well ask Bill Gates and George Soros. Both have been pumping millions of their own dollars into African TB prevention programs trying to put their little fingers into the holes in the dikes of our failing world capitalist medical system. Unlike some of the more dull witted super rich, these 2 men realize that drug resistant TB could ultimately kill off even rich folk like themslves, and not just poor Black HIV patients in South Africa. For a recent commentary about the evolution of this new and spreading pandemic, see this Guardian article

Minutemen Civil Defense Klan in hindsight

COLORADO SPRINGS- I had the pleasure Tuesday night to attend a membership recruiting meeting for a Minuteman border protection group. About fifty citizens turned up, with a collective IQ of probably about that. Lots of people eager to use their handguns against brown usurpers of American land, jobs and social programs.

Yesterday's bigotsProtect our border because the Federal Government won’t do it. Protect it against immigrants, Hepatitis B, Drug-resistant TB, drugs, rape & pillage (seriously) and terrorism. The pitch was big on the threat of terrorism, 9/11 and all.

We knew they were bigots because they didn’t care a lick about the Canadian border. My friend Mark Lewis and I were going to show up in Klan robes, to mix it up and mock their bigoted enthusiasm, but we got there late and copped out.

The meeting was held at a police station of all places. We were going to make a stink about that, but didn’t.

In fact I spent the whole meeting trying to think of pointed questions but didn’t say a peep. And worse, when a protestor stood up and disrupted the presentation I didn’t chime in with words of support. He was pelted with insults and led out of the room with his young daughter. I felt very bad that she would have been hurt by the universal condemnation of her dad’s heroism. I do so hope to run into the two again someday.

By the way, the man was called out of the room by the officer in charge at the Falcon Police Sub-station, Sargent Rob Kelly who had I guess appointed himself bouncer to the public meeting. The protestor’s comments were disruptive but not obstructive. The minuteman spokesman didn’t ask to be assisted, the officer abruptly jumped in.

Mark and I had decided our presence would be most effective after the meeting, providing an opposing voice interview to the TV crew. It worked out, the TV crew was just as repulsed as we at the presence of such trigger-happy white people meeting in a police station community room.

In hindsight, I might have some suggestions for effective communication disruptors, if the goal is to dissuade as many of the attendees as possible from signing up with the Minutemen. If you get a chance to attend one of these meetings, here are a couple tactics you might consider.

Don’t do the KKK robes, they won’t let you in the meeting and the satire will be lost on them. Instead wear a t-shirt with the vintage Klan poster depicting Uncle Sam saying “I want you to join the Klan.” Later in the slideshow the Minutemen have the same image but this time it says “I want you to join the Minutemen.”

The first thing the Minutemen do in their presentation is try to dispel the idea that they appeal to bigots. If you are motivated by racial or cultural hatred, they ask you to please leave. Now. I so wish that I’d chosen that uncomfortably silent moment to stand up and walk out, well almost out, before saying “just kidding!”

The rest of the meeting was just more cheap manipulation, with little room to question the truck-sized fallacies in their fear-mongering. Questions were only solicited well past the emotional appeals. Laughter might have cracked the reverential manner in which the audience absorbed the bombastic presentation.

A strange point: There’s a $50 fee for applicants who require a security check before being accepted. The fee is waived for anyone who has a handgun permit. I wonder if the Minutemen are interested in you if you don’t have a gun. How then would they expect you to shoot Mexicans?

Do you have any questions you’d like to ask the Minutemen?

Standing against veiled bigotry