"When many cures are offered for a disease, it means the disease is not curable" -Anton Chekhov
''Once you tell people there's a cure for something, the more likely they are to pressure doctors to prescribe it.'' -Robert Ehrlich, drug advertising executive.
"Opinions are like sphincters, everyone has one." - Chris Rangel
Get Your Act Together: The CDC says that doctors don’t know squat about smallpox. They interviewed seventeen doctors to form their opinion. Truthfully, the CDC has done very little in the way of educating physicians about bioterror in general. When the anthrax attacks occurred I relied on the American Academy of Family Physicians, which set up a special website for physician education on all matters bioterror. They put this site up within weeks of 9/11 and kept updating it constantly, so that when the anthrax attacks occurred, I felt at least somewhat prepared. The CDC website only provided me with links to JAMA articles on the diseases. They have since improved it, but it took them months to get anything useful up beyond basic information. It wasn't even very helpful in the immediate wake of the anthrax attacks. They haven’t done anything to get information to doctors who aren’t using the internet, of which there are many. I haven’t received any mailings or newsletters from them on bioterror updates. They haven’t been publishing them in widely read journals like JAMA or the New England Journal of Medicine. I only know about the CDC “ring vaccination” policy in the case of smallpox from what I’ve read in the popular media. If they spent half the energy getting information to physicians that they do getting it to the media, doctors would be better educated.
posted by Sydney on
5/10/2002 05:49:00 AM
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