Herd About It?
by Ana Grarian
This past week has proved very interesting.
At a house party last week I met an elderly woman who used to farm in the area Virgil NY. We briefly discussed what has happened to farming and farmers in our area. She is a neighbor I hadn’t met yet and we plan to get together to talk some more.
I listened to some area farmers ask good questions on nationally aired talk show broadcast from one of our local colleges.
I spent a lot of time in our local hospital ER while my daughter battled a MRSA abscess.
The hospital drama was more an indication of what can go wrong when an admitting Nurse Practioner, decides a patient is not worth the time required to treat compassionately, and decides to exact a little vengeance.
Both my daughter and I suffer with community associated MRSA. Most of the time flare ups are treatable at home with strong sanitation measures and diligence in keeping wounds clean, dry and covered. In a healthy individual MRSA is painful, scarring and troublesome, but not deadly. Even more serious flare ups respond to oral antibiotics after specimens are sent to a lab to determine which specific antibiotic to use.
Thankfully my daughter is now home, the abscess is healing well, and the problem at the hospital is being formally dealt with.
I can not say positively that our MRSA is agriculture related. Taking into account where we lived and that we did NOT acquire it in a hospital, it is likely. Never the less, given the seriousness of an infection, the pain it causes, and the contagiousness of it, I find it disturbing that our agricultural practices are responsible for spreading it. Practices that are unnecessary and harmful in so many ways to our nutritional health, the health of our water and air, and the health and welfare of both the animals and the farm workers.
Perhaps one reason that the industrialists don’t want universal health care is because they know that their production methods endanger the health of employees, communities and consumers. They don’t want to pay for their mistakes.
The Autistic community’s experience here may be instructive. During the 90s my brother-in-law and his wife had two children. The first was fine, though a little hyper. The second was fine at first, but after each inoculation autism in the form of aspergers showed up and it was progressive. The first time I met Ryan he was such a wild child you couldn’t get his attention period. He would run out into traffic. Only his mother and, to a lesser extent, his father had the faintest idea what he was saying. The shot/aspergers connection was pretty obvious to them, especially since Chris was studying to be a physician’s assistant.
The problem was a preservative that Merk, especially, was using called thimerosal that uses mercury. The quantity is small but the number of shots kids got back then were far more than we got. It’s accumulative. Some felt that, in certain cases, it could cross the placenta barrier. Controversial, yes. But there’s a question…
Instead of just saying, “We have no solid evidence (not quite true) that this is possible, but just to be sure, since there are other ways to do this, we will drop the mercury based preservative,” they did all they could to turn those who dared to even suggest some into anti-inoculation Religo-phobes and legally fought it.
I remember suggesting on a debate site that, since there were other methods, perhaps it best not to use mercury based substances and all I got back was a being called anti all inoculations and a religious fanatic. Chuckle. To quote Bugs: “Dey don’t know me vewe well!”
I think in the future, like lead and cigarettes, we will find a lot of what we were told was pretty bad. But the bigger corporations get, the less likely that will happen soon. Corporate personhood actually makes corporations our masters: superior to us. If I shoot you, I go to jail or even the chair/the needle. If a corporation kills hundreds of thousands, despite knowing that cigarettes were poison… at best they may be fined. Anything you or I can be punished for they either get off scot-free, or with far less punishment: especially those most responsible.
There’s a word for that: fascism, or at least corporatism.
Now, after all that…
What does MRSA stand for?
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a bacterial
infection that is highly resistant to some antibiotics. Staph skin
infections cause a red, swollen, and painful area on the skin …
http://www.google.com/health
Ah, “staph infection.” That I have heard of and know of. Not unlike “staff infections:” a massive problem during the Bush years. The whole place was sick.
I tried yesterday to get in and do a few corrections on my comment. The server kept making obscene gestures at best.
For example, it was Eli Lily, not Merk. (“Merc?”)
I know about staph infections and abscesses — I nearly died of one about ten years ago. My abscess was caused by a case of food poisoning that had been treated by antibiotics. I felt better after a few days, took my pills until they ran out, but I needed another week’s worth of antibiotics to entirely get rid of the infection — the remnants of the botulism went dormant in my liver. Six months later, I came down with a bad case of the flu and, with my immune system fighting that disease, the botulism mutated into a staph infection and pushed its way out of fissures in my liver so that an abscess was growing out of my side. It took a couple of months in the hospital, many and varied antibiotics, and a liver operation to get rid of it completely. It’s nothing to fool with, IMO.
As to what Ken was talking about, I wouldn’t be surprised, considering the pathetic state of drug testing in this country and the willingness of the FDA to kowtow to Big Phrama, that vaccines would cause all kinds of conditions, including autism. Remember those mobile free chest X-Ray vans that were all over back in the 50s and 60s? A nurse friend said that they probably caused more lung cancer than they discovered — although it’s uncertain whether the trainees doing the scanning were fully aware of how dangerous X-Rays could be. And American medicine stumbles on.
BTW, Ken, it’s ‘Merck’ and ‘Eli Lilly’.
Couldn’t remember the spelling of one and the other I tried to put in as a correction correct later with further inability to correct. I did remember it was EL that was the main source of the debate. The loading on this for corrections was a bear a few hours ago, and most of yesterday. Indeed, finally impossible. I finally gave up trying.
And how about those X-ray feet sizers they had at the shoe store? Didn’t they think that anything that let us see through the body with such ease probably isn’t good for us, or at least should be used on a limited basis until proven? Why is it we jump on some tech wagons without hardly thinking but never let others through the gate. Let me see. A guess. The larger, the more powerful the corporation the quicker we let it pass, the less likely they’ll even catch much hell?
I remember as a kid doctors and hospitals would routinely shoot people up with penicillin, even though it was known some patients were allergic. Those who got sick from the penicillin were told their illness was due to something else, to protect the doctor/hospital from lawsuits. I wonder how much of that kind of thing goes on today?
I know the parents who have concerns about thimerosal in the injections were told by a few that their son’s autism was their own fault. Reasons varied and seemed somewhat stupid, like “you’re not paying enough attention to him” when they absolutely were.
Sort of s sidebar: at the doc for my regular physical last week the doc asked for my concerns. Each one was supposedly weight connected. Then I mentioned my sore shoulder when I lean on a table like I have been for at least 50 years… without a problem. When he said that was weight connected I scooted a chair up to his examination table, leaned on it and said, “Doctor, where’s my excess weight?” (Obviously below the table.) “So is that caused by weight?” He had to admit, “No.” Caught he ended the examination as quickly as possible.
The medical field gets into these certain funks, like cholesterol where if it’s even a point over they’ll give you medication with far worse effect because being even one point over means they can feed the pharma industry who is constantly banging on their doors. I think they convince themselves it’s good for the patient, whatever the cause of the time is.
I suspect even if it’s as much a concern as the current medical meme’ claims, if it can be treated without medication that is always preferable.
Both cholesterol and high blood pressure drugs are the current ‘fads’ for medicos. As W.C. Douglass, along with other renegade doctors have said, a small elevation in cholesterol or blood pressure levels is normal and nothing to take a pill to adjust. Some people naturally have higher cholesterol than others and are still healthy, and the same is true of high blood pressure, which fluctuates. Once I had a heated argument before going to the doctor and his nurse wanted to prescribe expesnive blood pressure control medications even though my blood pressure had been normal during previous visits. Fortunately, the doctor listened to me and decided not to prescribe blood pressure drugs and check my blood pressure on my next visit. (It had returned to normal by then.)
Vioxx, Prozac, the landscape is littered with medications that Big Pharma marketed to doctors to push on us which turned out to be ‘cures’ where the side effects were often worse than the ailment. The point of most of this, of course, is to increase the profits of Big Pharma rather than help the patient. As the head of Merck said 30 years ago, his aim was to sell drugs to healthy people, and that’s what they’re doing.
I’m sort of inclined these days to agree with Bill Hicks’ suggestion to those in advertising and marketing; if you’re involved in this kind of maleficent medicine — just do everyone a favor and shoot yourself.
Blood pressure is the big thing at my clinic. I went with a raging allergic reaction to something and all she wanted to do was talk blood pressure and of course the weight that caused it. Had to beg her to look at my reason for making the appt. (My BP was 140/90 maybe up due to the allergic reaction?)
I have the same problems w/shoulder pain at the desk. I think that its probably arthritis related and I think also as we get older we may have a tendency to support ourselves more or for longer periods of time on our arms.
Any who – glad to be alive and able to talk back!
As one of the best doctors I’ve ever been to, a GP, once said about elevated blood pressure: “The best cure is to take a few deep breaths and sit down and relax for a while. If it persists, cut out the caffeine and chocolate.” Of course, extremely high blood pressure is a real problem, but that’s fairly rare — most people being treated for high blood pressure these days are only in the moderately elevated range. Naturally, Big Pharma makes a fortune from blood pressure drugs.