Saturday, June 02, 2007
Being Abnormal
"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people."
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
Was watching a CNN show about TB and the TB traveler. Didn't know that Eleanor Roosevelt lived with it. Perhaps this incident will wake up people and get our declining public health system fixed. Drug resistant Tuberculosis is a World Health problem. It was one of the diseases reported about in Rx for Survival. XDR TB is treatable, but the treatments are costly. It loves people with HIV and indeed, it's been on the rise in infected HIV populations. The reason we have drug resistant TB is that people stop taking the antibiotics after they feel better, but they haven't cleared the TB infection. The bacteria are given a second chance and the surviving germs are often resistant to the antibiotics that were used to treat the patient. It's a disease of poor people who mostly live in the third world. There's no financial incentive for pharmaceutical companies to make a cheap vaccine or treatment. Throw in cheap air travel, a highly communicable, infectious disease and you have a public health nightmare. Now, was Mr. Speaker contagious? Who knows? Only time will tell, but chances are that he wasn't. But you don't want to have extremely drug resistant TB. He'll likely be cured, but for many people who contract the illness he has, it is a death sentence.
The previous paragraph has nothing to do with the quote above. If anything, it makes me seem average or small. But you'd be wrong about me. There are all sorts of ideas happening and being discussed at the moment. Michael Moore's "Sicko" may cause a national health care debate to ensue. Ron Paul is sounding like a someone who actually has read up on terrorism since he's talking about reevaluating American foreign policy and its blowback. Doctors are discovering that when they give oxygen to heart attack victims that they are actually killing them quicker instead of saving them. Chances are that the underlying cellular mechanism at work in oxygen deprived people is the same one that allows hydrogen sulphide induced hibernation to work. Astronomers are peering farther and farther from home. They are peering into the atmospheres of faraway planets and stars, measuring the mass, distance and density of dark matter. Female cheetahs are polygamous, which makes sense since cheetahs went through a genetic bottleneck thousands of years ago and cheetahs are highly genetically homogeneous (inbred). It's in their interest to have multiple cubs from multiple fathers. Stephen O'Brien has suggested that one female cheetah and her cubs survived the cheetah mass extinction and the cheetahs clawed their way back (to steal a phrase from The Register web site). Now they just have to survive us.
So, the take home lesson here is to never be average. Be passionate about something and try to make a difference. Although all life and all things are fleeting, we are all here for a purpose. Everyone and everything is equally sacred and precious. Discover yourself and who you really are.
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
Was watching a CNN show about TB and the TB traveler. Didn't know that Eleanor Roosevelt lived with it. Perhaps this incident will wake up people and get our declining public health system fixed. Drug resistant Tuberculosis is a World Health problem. It was one of the diseases reported about in Rx for Survival. XDR TB is treatable, but the treatments are costly. It loves people with HIV and indeed, it's been on the rise in infected HIV populations. The reason we have drug resistant TB is that people stop taking the antibiotics after they feel better, but they haven't cleared the TB infection. The bacteria are given a second chance and the surviving germs are often resistant to the antibiotics that were used to treat the patient. It's a disease of poor people who mostly live in the third world. There's no financial incentive for pharmaceutical companies to make a cheap vaccine or treatment. Throw in cheap air travel, a highly communicable, infectious disease and you have a public health nightmare. Now, was Mr. Speaker contagious? Who knows? Only time will tell, but chances are that he wasn't. But you don't want to have extremely drug resistant TB. He'll likely be cured, but for many people who contract the illness he has, it is a death sentence.
The previous paragraph has nothing to do with the quote above. If anything, it makes me seem average or small. But you'd be wrong about me. There are all sorts of ideas happening and being discussed at the moment. Michael Moore's "Sicko" may cause a national health care debate to ensue. Ron Paul is sounding like a someone who actually has read up on terrorism since he's talking about reevaluating American foreign policy and its blowback. Doctors are discovering that when they give oxygen to heart attack victims that they are actually killing them quicker instead of saving them. Chances are that the underlying cellular mechanism at work in oxygen deprived people is the same one that allows hydrogen sulphide induced hibernation to work. Astronomers are peering farther and farther from home. They are peering into the atmospheres of faraway planets and stars, measuring the mass, distance and density of dark matter. Female cheetahs are polygamous, which makes sense since cheetahs went through a genetic bottleneck thousands of years ago and cheetahs are highly genetically homogeneous (inbred). It's in their interest to have multiple cubs from multiple fathers. Stephen O'Brien has suggested that one female cheetah and her cubs survived the cheetah mass extinction and the cheetahs clawed their way back (to steal a phrase from The Register web site). Now they just have to survive us.
So, the take home lesson here is to never be average. Be passionate about something and try to make a difference. Although all life and all things are fleeting, we are all here for a purpose. Everyone and everything is equally sacred and precious. Discover yourself and who you really are.
Comments:
<< Home
If anything, it makes me seem average or small. But you'd be wrong about me.
You appear to be interested in correcting a potential misperception... where does that fall on the A.E.Roosevelt scale?
You appear to be interested in correcting a potential misperception... where does that fall on the A.E.Roosevelt scale?
I suppose that I was worried about staying on message. That entry kind of went all over the place. It was one of those weird routes where you are reading about tuberculosis and then find out that a First Lady as influential and wealthy as Mrs. Roosevelt, who was very much ahead of her time, lived and died with that disease. It never slowed her down much it seems.
We live in the same town, how about lunch one day?
You could tell me all about AJ.
Also, consider, I am conducting nude drawing classes for some professional teachers in the Dallas area, and, I always need 'real' nude models, any interest, you're real?
Post a Comment
You could tell me all about AJ.
Also, consider, I am conducting nude drawing classes for some professional teachers in the Dallas area, and, I always need 'real' nude models, any interest, you're real?
<< Home
