Topic
Caution: Government embarrassment may be hazardous to your health. Epidemics prove it.
Magnified enterohemorrhagic E. coli bacteria.
Feds' lack of support for clean needles latest deadly embarrassment says head of Dr. Peter AIDS Foundation.
The past teaches an avian flu epidemic could claim tens of millions.
'Dread' details how epidemics help promote some sick political agendas.
The other day I took a break from blogging about the wave of E. coli cases in Germany. For almost two weeks, I'd been tracking a mysterious outbreak of "enterohemorrhagic E. coli," or EHEC. It's a disease caused by a strain of bacteria that normally live in our guts in their billions without making any trouble.
This strain, however, was worse than alarming. Over 2,000 people had fallen ill within a matter of days. Apart from bloody diarrhea and vomiting, many of them had moved on to hemolytic uremic syndrome -- the destruction of red blood cells and then of their kidneys, often with severe neurological problems.
I'd been covering EHEC since receiving an email from a German who reads my H5N1 blog. That was early in the morning of May 24, and by noon I was tracking an outbreak that seemed like no other I've followed.
But when I took my break, it was to read a book about the Phoenix Mars lander project of 2008, whose author interviewed the project's chief engineer. What the engineer said was about the bureaucracy of NASA, but it could easily describe every public-health crisis I've been blogging about since 2005.
"I see how people work," the engineer had said. "It generally goes like this: selfless dedication from the technicians, and gutless decision-making from the top. Those who make gutless decisions don't understand risk. They are only afraid of embarrassment. They don't have the courage of character to understand and explain."
Well, the penny dropped. He could have been talking about the botching of the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, bird flu in Indonesia, swine flu around the world, Haiti's earthquake and cholera outbreak, and Japan's earthquake and tsunami.
Protecting their egos
In all those cases, the technicians were concerned with doing some good. Their bosses were concerned with protecting their egos and asses.
In Haiti, cholera broke out shortly after Nepalese peacekeepers arrived last fall. Kathmandu had seen a cholera outbreak in September, and it's clear that at least one of the Nepalese soldiers was shitting Cholera vibrio while stationed in his barracks. Through a leaky septic tank, his shit got into the local water system, and since then over 300,000 Haitians have fallen ill. Over 5,000 have died.
The UN first denied the obvious and then commissioned a report on the causes of the outbreak. That report admitted that the strain of cholera was from south Asia, but never quite named the Nepalese. That would have been embarrassing.
Meanwhile, Haiti's own public health ministry pretended to tally the cases and deaths. But it's always been two or three weeks late, probably undercounts the real toll, and it offers no analysis. The minister, an invisible man named Alex Larsen, says nothing about cholera or any other health issue. His ministry isn't paying its cholera-treatment workers on time.
Even the World Health Organization doesn't say much about an outbreak that makes it look bad. It says even less about the ongoing cholera next door in the Dominican Republic, where the doctors and the ministry of public health are battling about who's to blame. Meanwhile community teams are going through the slums and finding plenty of cholera cases.
Japan: So sorry
After the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, Tokyo seemed to run a pretty good relief effort. Quake drills doubtless saved thousands of lives. But the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the Fukushima nuclear power plant, was clearly unprepared for a disaster on this scale.
While its workers splashed through radioactive water in the ruined reactor buildings, absorbing serious doses, TEPCO executives spent their time apologizing on TV, with deep bows, for the trouble they'd caused. So did the current prime minister, Naoto Kan. The bowing and apologies have been going on for over two months. So have the radiation overdoses.
The International Atomic Energy Agency was running daily updates on the disaster, as it should have. But now they're intermittent. Fukushima makes it look bad too.
Now it's Germany's turn. Hospitals in northern Germany have been swamped with patients made half-insane by this nasty strain of E. coli. The German government, after asking the patients to fill out questionnaires, first blamed the outbreak on Spanish cucumbers.
Losing 200 million euros a week
That instantly cost Spain's agriculture industry 200 million euros a week, not to mention collateral damage to Dutch and other European farmers: Russia has banned all vegetable imports from all EU countries until further notice.
Bizarrely, a Spanish woman contracted EHEC just before running in the Hamburg Marathon. Halfway through, she began to feel sick, and then really sick. She still managed to come in fourth, her legs covered with blood, and she's been in hospital ever since.
The German health agencies soon found cucumbers blameless, but Berlin continued to warn against cukes, tomatoes, and lettuce. The Robert Koch Institute, roughly equivalent to the Public Health Agency of Canada, issued short, uninformative announcements while the German media whipped up hysteria.
On the first weekend in June, researchers found that the likely source is a single organic farm in Lower Saxony, whose bean sprouts ended up in many salads in Lübeck, Hamburg, and elsewhere. By then, the European Council was calling for urgent meetings at which Germany would have a lot of explaining to do.
Since EHEC began in mid-May, a lot of European doctors and nurses have been working flat out, cleaning up their patients and losing at least 22 of them. Hundreds of other victims are likely to survive with lifelong disabilities.
The next health catastrophe: Bureaucratic embarrassment
But the senior bureaucrats and politicians, like their counterparts in Japan, Haiti, and the UN, have been working flat out to save themselves from embarrassment. They spin the problem to blame someone else, they ignore awkward evidence, and they say as little as possible.
In other words, your government's fear of embarrassment may be hazardous to your health, and that seems as likely for us in Canada as for other "advanced" nations.
We have no reason to suppose that our federal and provincial governments will be transparent and honest when the next health disaster hits us. After our experience with H1N1 in 2009, we have every reason to suppose that the B.C. Centre for Disease Control will tell us to wash our hands a lot and not to worry.
This culture of immunity has been entrenched for decades. No doubt many healthcare experts understand how unsanitary it is. They remember Ignaz Semmelweiss, who warned his medical colleagues that they were killing mothers in childbirth with their dirty hands and blood-crusted aprons. Those colleagues laughed at him, and went on killing their patients. Semmelweiss died insane.
Until we demand more honesty from our managers, we will go on losing people -- not just to cholera or EHEC or radiation poisoning, but to our managers' fear of embarrassment. ![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
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Grumpy
1 year ago
Just like Canada, eh?
TransLink; SkyTrain; Ken Hardie.
TransLink's bureaucrats continue to plan and build SkyTrain, when the rest of the world has discarded it as a museum piece and use $160K+ a year spin doctor Ken Hardie to spin tales of joy and jubilation about the metro, to save the transit establishment from embarrassment.
We live in an age where senior bureaucrats have huge powers to save them from public embarrassing situations, and do not care for the 'common' guy or gal.
As politicians are tied at the hip with bureaucrats, the same is true and the truth is forgotten or hidden away at others expense, just ask Susan Heyes.
Fiat lux
1 year ago
All this is the result of
All this is the result of globalization and "big is beautiful", with the destruction of local industries and local decision making, food growing through the collectivization of economies into the hands of a new ruling class, Stalin and Mao couldn't even dreamed of.
The enclosed article, sent to me just now by a scientist friend, makes some very interesting points, in a way showing why Harper wants to have more fraudulent "free trade" treaties with the EU, India and 50 more nations: To concentrate and control economies into the hands of a new ruling class for the complete control of lives.
"Wealth can not be created, only taken" and these are good examples of the results
Ed Deak.
-----------------------------------
E. Coli ? Don't eat fresh vegetables ??
E. Coli a weapon of war ??
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Forensic-evidence-emerges-by-Mike-Adams-110606-498.html
By Mike Adams opednews.com
From Natural News
---------------------
http://www.naturalnews.com/
Greg in Calgary
1 year ago
Let the defunding begin!
Well, plus these bureaucrats are wasting tax dollars to begin with. The sooner we stop using taxpayers' money to support these parasites, the better off we'll all be.
Fish-counter
1 year ago
So it is official: a bug is faster than a bureaucrat
I always knew it.
Fiat lux
1 year ago
Remember when, in good
Remember when, in good "conservative" fashion, Mulroney wanted to eliminate all protection agencies, and replace them with "market discipline" and "competition" ?
Harper will probably will want to do the same, conveniently ignoring that corporate profits are also a form of taxation coming out of the taxpayers' pockets and privatization always costs more, both in money and problems, caused by "cost cuttings"
Costs can not be curt only transferred on other sectors, the environment and future generations.
Since the neoliberal, neoclassical, criminal, costs cutting, economic theory was forced on the world about 40 years ago, monetary costs inflated over 1,000%, all sicknesses, especially cancers, diabetes, autism etc. went out of control.
And so have the profits of the multinational corporate mafia, now ruling the world with "foreign investment" and practices causing ecological and human destruction
Ed Deak.
morechatter
1 year ago
deny, deny, deny and if that dosen't work, lie
It is what Canadians ask of their politicians(parisites) as Oda still has her seat. I felt for sure the Liberals would have been handed over the election if they could have just hung in there a little longer like the fall when the so called booming economy is seen for what it really is, a big fat bust. At least I will not feel like the biggest fool out there for voting in Harper and his bag of tricks and dirty old men, that is reserved for Conservative voters.
zalm
1 year ago
Having been on both sides
I find the culture of blame-shifting goes on at both levels. The fault is the promotion to management of those who are untested, and lacking in training programs or managers, we are sure to produce more blame-shifters wherever we go.
Blameshifting as a worker generally produces little effect, Walkerton notwithstanding. Blameshifting as a manager usually produces instant bad results because everyone else knows what you're doing. Yet, senior levels often have little ability to correct the situation because just enough of them engage in blameshifting as Kilian points out, that the enterprise becomes paralyzed.
It doesn't matter whether the person involved has great intellect or a superb education - I've met both who were crappy managers, and good one. Their skill as a manager had a lot to do with their experience and most of all with their capacity and desire for blame-shifting. You can't teach this in school - it's learned in life.
Though never a blame-shifter as a manager, I was nevertheless ineffective. However, it did allow others to see where I needed help, and I recall two managers working alongside me for a few hours a month to turn me into a productive person capable of assigning resources, evaluating results, and holding my employees to account effectively. There were a ton of management tools at my disposal which I had to spend all kinds of private time learning, but it gave me a whole new perspective on doing the work as a worker, even while I decided the next priority as a manager.
I wouldn't trade the experience for the world. That said, I'm no longer there because it was a brutal environment - the ability to produce results when hamstrung by limited finances and provincial regulation that altered the priorities of the organization at a whim affected my work badly.
The ship is still sinking, several years later, but it hasn't gone down yet - the government has merely installed bigger bilge pumps.
Fish-counter
1 year ago
Don't worry Zalm. The bacteria will win anyway
They don't need to fill oout forms to exchange their DNA. Transferrable drug resistance is a bitch. Call it Nature's Way of culling homo sapiens. The death toll so far is miniscule.
zalm
1 year ago
Hard to worry, Fish-counter
...when stupidity seems to be equally transferrable too. Besides, every natural system is a self-correcting one. As many bacteria will be overcome by others as will overcome us. Our best hope is to find more parasites that we can be host to and still have some quality of life.
...repulsive as that sounds.
OwlRol
1 year ago
Fiat, I read that oped
Fiat, I read that oped article. Somewhat of an interesting conspiracy theory, could be real.
This event was tracked to an organic sprout farm, but where did their fertilizer originate? Could those sprouts have been contaminated by improperly composted animal based manure, already resistant to those antibiotics used in feed, or...?
Greg in Calgary, as to bureaucracy, the behaviour outlined above occurs as much in the private sector as in the public, maybe more, given that transparency is not required in the private side.
I got called up on the carpet twice for going public on errors by the organization I worked for. Truth was not the issue I got reamed out on, rather how would it make the organization look.
There could be some justification here. Consider the tainted blood, Red Cross fiasco that led to serious reductions in blood donations to the point of shortages for needed emergency procedures.
But more often it is all about appearance. If, over time, you've moved up the ladder, you don't want to lose it all, especially if an error was not your doing. But such a label sticks to all, responsible or not.
The worst is that our cultural shift has pushed that "style over substance" way of thinking. Just look at all the cosmetic, fashion and home gym ads. And don't forget the hot cars. Who you are has become less important than what you look like. You must somehow be one of the beautiful people to get ahead in this competitive world, formal dress et al.
The suits don't want to be held back or even lose the occupations they worked so hard to reach.
But it does not justify being dishonest or ignoring information that can prevent deaths or serious injury.
I'll never forget the meeting of Monsanto executives who were served an organic luncheon because they really didn't trust eating their own products.
Fiat lux
1 year ago
Turns out that the E Coli
Turns out that the E Coli wasn't caused by the bean sprouts after all, so, it is now back to square one.
Owl... There are no conspiracy theories, only conspiracies and all wealth creating and economic theories in history have been bona fide conspiracies to enrich certain ruling sectors, under the guise of religions and ideologies, because:
"Wealth can not be created, only taken from others, the environment and future generations."
I've only been writing this on this site about 200 times in the past 6 years.
Who knows, it may even sink in one day, that we can't create anything, only transform resources into energy and other forms.
This has only been taught in the world's highschools for 100 years, but our so called "economists" have been using the usual religious faiths and "conservative" ideologies, which are the same, to deny it.
With the obvious, disastrous results,as it has been going on in a million years of human history, yet people still falling for the latest crap put forward to fool and enslave them mentally and physically.
Ed Deak.
OwlRol
1 year ago
Not Spanish cukes, not
Not Spanish cukes, not sprouts, that bioengineering notion looks more feasable all the time.
Yup, agreed. We don't actually create, only use and transform what's available, even amongst the most imaginative and productive folks.
An IP millwright buddy quipped in the early 80s that shifting from a resource extraction economy to a knowledge economy cannot be sustained over the long haul. Missing was that secondary, value added component, and it still is mostly missing, as we ship out raw logs, minerals, bitumen, grains and fish catches to be processed elsewhere.
We are lucky to have such abundant resources with a relatively small population. That is changing for a variety of reasons, worst being the corporate race to quickly get as much as possible for its big shareholders.
Countries like Bangladesh are not so fortunate as they heavily overuse and thus degrade the limited resources, notably per capita, that they have, with some nasty consequences. But they're just further down the same road we're on.
But governments and corporations don't want to put on the brakes unless heavily pressured by a reluctant public. So on we go. We are surely sloppily taking more than nature can restore as our eco footprint keeps growing.
When things go wrong, this centralized planning can't cope, as is so evident with this E coli outbreak. Walkerton was a crisis that resulted in some deaths and more health problems, but at least it was locally located and controlled.
But the very large regional and global model of trade and finance puts us all at risk, be it this event or SARS or invasive species or..., never mind the wasted fuel in often oxymoronic trade systems.
And those enlargement producing corporate takeovers and profits for doing almost nothing positive, as they externalize their costs, lead us into this type of mess. Truly the opposite of creation. More like the effects of Sea Lice than corrals.
raging senior
1 year ago
THE BLAME GAME
When I worked in industry and there was an accident or a major problem the Supervisor would first try to absolve himself of all blame then try to absolve the Company of all blame then find someone to blame, somewhere down the chain.