Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Food for Thought: Health Care

From the August 11 & 18 New Yorker, "Superbugs," by Jerome Groopman:

Before the development of antibiotics, the threat of infection was urgent: until 1936, pneumonia was the No. 1 cause of death in the United States, and amputation was sometimes the only cure for infected wounds.

That was only 72 years ago.

1 comment:

ACM said...

yeah -- there was a long article on multi-drug-resistant bacteria in the New Yorker recently, and it really kept me up nights. I don't know what we can do to keep antibiotics out of our food chain (the raising of animals for food uses tons of such materials every year just for a small % weight gain), but I fully expect that we will repent this laxity at leisure...

Union of Concerned Scientists is one organization trying to fight this fight! there's a lot hospitals can do, too, to prevent hospital-acquired infections, but it takes vigilance...