H1N1 is Worse Than We Thought

Ever since I was doing my clinical rotation at Amherst College I've known in the back of my head that the swine flu outbreak was going to be bad. The father of a lacrosse player there works for Infectious Disease Control in Boston and he drove out to Amherst late one night to give his son 3 different kinds of shots that, at the time, could help with the swine flu.

According to the Center for Disease Control there have been 22 million cases of swine flu and more than 4000 deaths due to swine flu. Interestingly enough, in China where there population is exploding, they have only suffered 70,000 cases and only 53 deaths! China has also staged a massive vaccination effort in trying to vaccinate 1.5 million people per day and hopefully reach 90 million people by the end of the year. This doesn't help with Americans because we can barely get 42 million doses of the vaccine.

After going to Florida over the weekend I found it ironic that I came across this article from Disney World. Disney has decided to install hand sanitizer dispensers around their parks. When I thought about it I actually do remember seeing hand sanitizer boxes all over the place down there and these boxes were not there when I went down back in May.

I feel like our government needs to step up and do something about this outbreak. Our country is supposed to have one of the top health cares in the world but yet we have over 4,000 deaths from swine flu and can't provide our country with vaccinations to stop these deaths from occuring. In my eyes, our country is pathetic and needs to do something about it.

http://www.charter.net/news/read.php?id=16023045&ps=1019&cat=&cps=0&lang=en

http://www.charter.net/news/read.php?id=16021209&ps=1019&cat=&cps=0&lang=en&page=2

Red Cross is Feeling the Pain of the Bad Economy

From what I read in this article is seems that the economy has been so bad that the Red Cross is selling pieces of its history to make money back from an over $200 million deficit in which they still have $33.5 million left. Everything from old WWII nurse uniforms to what may be the last Civil War era flag in existence is being auctioned off.

I can't believe that our economy is so bad that a company that was so crucial to our health while we started as a country has to auctioned off artifacts just so they can stay on their feet. Meanwhile we sit here giving out billions of dollars to General Motors so they can keep making cars so that our quickly growing obese population can eat more and drive themselves around. Here's an idea, stop making cars, get off the couch and use your own 2 feet, take a train somewhere if you need to, and throw those billions of dollars into our health care system that seems to be quickly falling apart.

I'm getting a bit heated thinking about this issue right now so I'll stop before I start cussing like a sailor but what do you guys think about this issue?