|
medpundit |
||
 |
 |
|
Saturday, May 03, 2003Seattle has yet to face its first confirmed case of severe acute respiratory syndrome, the stealthy, fast-moving illness that has caused panic and death from China to Canada. But for Dr. Alonzo Plough, head of the Seattle-King County Public Health Department and for many of his colleagues around the country, the impact of SARS has arrived in full force, striking their agencies like a freak natural disaster. "Very critical public health activities are not being done because of these very pressing demands of the moment," Plough said. .....Plough calculates that SARS investigations and related work cost the department $160,000 in the first three weeks alone. Goodness. How do they spend that money so fast? They say it’s spent tracking down contacts of possible cases, printing up multilingual patient-education signs for their public health clinics, and answering as many as six(!) phone calls an hour. They claim to have had to investigate 60 possible cases of SARS in Seattle, but the CDC figures say that there have only been 44 in all of Washington. And six phone calls an hour? Staff at an average doctor’s office would think that a cakewalk. But perhaps the most ridiculous of the arguments is this: Dr. Laurene Mascola of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services put the squeeze in blunt terms. "We have dealt with SARS to the detriment of other diseases," she said, pointing out that in California about 2,000 people die every month from unexplained pneumonia. That figure seems high for just one state, especially since the entire nation, the death rate from pneumonia is around 64,000 annually. But, even if 2,000 people a month die of pneumonia in California, most of those deaths occur in people are at the ends of their lives (it isn’t called the “old man’s friend” for nothing). And the institutions that care for those people are hospitals and hospices, not public health departments. But, of course, exaggeration is a critical tool when angling for more money. posted by Sydney on 5/03/2003 09:07:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
|
