Stamps & Beads
I've been enjoying Farrago, a weblog by a rubber stamp and bead fan. I haven't talked a lot about stamps and beads around here lately, but they're still a big part of my life.
I feel like I should write something about current events, what's going on in the news, but I just can't seem to do it. It wears me out to try to express what I'm thinking about all of that stuff. The one thing I will say is, people really need to get a grip on this whole anthrax panic. I am pretty sure that the panic over anthrax is significantly more dangerous to society as a whole than anthrax itself. Look at the science instead of the hype.
I, for one, was heartened by this article in yesterday's New York Times:
- In Some Circles Anthrax Falls to the B-List
By Abigail Zuger, M.D.
Even as New Yorkers flinched at every new mention of anthrax last week and fought rising panic, the regular Monday meeting of the city's infectious disease specialists unfolded more or less as usual.
True, there were two cases of anthrax in the city, possibly more. But there was also a case of cholera here last spring. An unusual, near-fatal case of the dire food poisoning known as listeriosis surfaced over the summer. A young German man picked up a peculiar, disfiguring case of H.I.V. A businessman came down with a bizarre fungal infection on the golf course. A Mexican deliveryman almost died from inhaling a rare soil organism common in Central America.
Against the panorama of microbes that routinely wander through this city and threaten its residents, the hypothetical threat of anthrax seemed to fade a little.
For 30 years, the Monday afternoon infectious disease meeting has drawn specialists from around the metropolitan area. Every week, doctors take turns describing the most interesting, perplexing or alarming infections they have seen.
Back in 1979 and 1980, when AIDS, still unnamed, was sending a trickle of sick patients into New York hospitals with puzzling symptoms, it was the overview at this weekly meeting that gave city doctors a vision of a new and frightening pattern of illness well before the rest of the country caught on.
Last Monday, the anthrax scare created exactly the opposite situation: the name of a disease was resonating through the city, but the regulars at the meeting had no actual cases to discuss. The single case of cutaneous anthrax to have been identified here at that point had been treated for two weeks and the patient was doing well. Any other cases were still hypothetical.
"We thought the collective wisdom of this group could be extremely useful to the city at this point," said Dr. Stephen Baum, head of medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center, president of the Infectious Disease Society of New York and a member of the mayor's task force on bioterrorism. Dr. Baum took the podium at the start of the meeting for a brief brainstorming session about anthrax.
Not one of the 150 doctors in the auditorium was seriously worried that a tide of infection was about to drown the city. Anthrax, which is not transmitted from person to person and is treatable with antibiotics, is not a scary organism in these particular circles. It is not nearly as frightening and potentially dangerous as, for instance, the drug-resistant tuberculosis germ that swept through the city in the early 1990's, killing hundreds.
It was the rising tide of unnecessary anthrax panic that bothered the doctors, and also the obsession with the antibiotic Cipro, when drugs related to Cipro should also treat and prevent anthrax, and penicillin and tetracycline should be safer and cheaper alternatives for most patients.
[read the whole article]
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