Beware of hospitals.

 

This article is by  Anneli Rufus

 

Infection: How Hospitals Are Breeding Grounds for Superbugs You've Never Even Heard Of

We don't think of hospitals as places where we can get sick. But that's what they are, far more commonly than the healthcare industry wants us to know.

  

 

 

Hospitalized for pneumonia, Lisa Thayer's mother was suddenly gripped with painful cramps and a bout of diarrhea that Thayer calls "explosive."

"It had a horribly distinctive smell -- a gross almost-sweetness that made me close my eyes. The hospital staff recognized it immediately," says Thayer, a Houston architect. "They said, 'Uh oh. It's C-diff.'"

Thayer had never heard of C-diff, aka Clostridium difficile: a potentially lethal colon-destroying bacteria. It spreads via fecal-oral contact. An infected person's feces contain bacteria that form sturdy disinfectant-resistant spores that can survive in the open for five months. A hand touches a contaminated surface, then enters a mouth. Think you're not eating shit? In hospitals, you quite possibly are.

According to a recent article in American Family Physician, 13 percent of patients hospitalized for up to two weeks catch Clostridium difficile, as do 50 percent of those hospitalized for four weeks or more. But you needn't be a patient to catch C-diff. All you need do is visit a hospital.

Over the last decade, C-diff has morphed into a superbug. A new epidemic strain emerged in 2004 that is now making C-diff ever more virulent, drug-resistant, prevalent and lethal. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that C-diff kills nearly 30,000 people in America every year. Some experts call this a low estimate.

We think of hospitals as places where diseases go away, not as places where we can get sick.

But that's what they are, far more commonly than the healthcare industry wants us to know. In a crisis that costs American hospitals some $40 billion every year, millions of infections are contracted annually within these ostensibly sanitary institutions. Collectively, they're called hospital-acquired infections, nosocomial infections or HAIs. Patients face the gravest risk, but visitors are far from immune.

C-diff is the meanest new microbial kid on the block, but it's not the only one. Another hospital-dwelling superbug is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, aka MRSA: a drug-resistant staph infection that is on the CDC's "high priority" list and kills about 18,000 every year in the US. Infection rates have skyrocketed since 1980 as MRSA evolves at warp speed, outsmarting antibiotics that now can't kill it. Contracted through cuts in the skin, MRSA can cause deadly bone, blood and organ infections. Nearly 90 percent of MRSA cases originate in hospitals.

Swing by to see Dad after his hip-replacement surgery, and you could catch something that ravages your bowels, causes flesh-eating pneumonia, and/or kills you.
Children, seniors and people with health problems -- especially those taking antibiotics or undergoing chemotherapy -- face the highest risk of contracting C-diff when visiting hospitals.

"But anyone can develop C-diff if the spores enter their mouth," says former New York State Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey, who combats HAIs through her advocacy group, the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths. "Visiting a hospital recently, I saw a child in the elevator eating French fries and touching all the surfaces. I wished that I could explain to the parents that these invisible C-diff spores are on everything."

That is, everything that infected people's feces have touched. And those explosive, watery C-diff feces have a knack for traveling. We're talking walls, sinks, toilets, linens, light switches, furniture, wheelchairs, drapes, handles, knobs, telephones, trays, uniforms, buttons, doors and floors. Standard cleaning methods with alcohol and ammonia products won't kill C-diff spores; pretty much only bleach can.

"Don't bother using alcohol-based hand sanitizers," McCaughey warns. "They won't work. Wash with soap and water -- but even then, you're not killing the germs. Soap doesn't kill them. You're just washing them down the drain.

"Children are especially at risk of infection because when they visit Grandma in the hospital, they don't behave in risk-averse ways. They crawl on the floor. They pick things up and eat them. They touch everything. They're unaware that this is a very perilous environment."

Parents planning hospital visits "should leave their children home. Get a babysitter," McCaughey urges. To protect oneself as well as the patient and fellow visitors, she says, "bring a canister of bleach wipes and rubber gloves instead of flowers or fruit."

C-diff spores and other pathogens can cling to those gifts and cards that pile up in patients' rooms. McCaughey advises never touching these items and, if bringing someone home from the hospital, leaving gifts and cards behind.

"They're infected. Do you want to take those bugs home to your family?"

MRSA bacteria are hardy, too. According to one study, they can survive up to 56 days on polyester-cotton fabric and three months on plastic. Other studies found MRSA bacteria surviving a week on plain cotton fabric and two weeks on terrycloth.

Alcohol can kill MRSA bacteria, but that matters little if surfaces aren't scrubbed.

"Every hospital has a procedure for hygiene," says Lisa Thayer, who remembers watching in horror as an orderly who had just cleaned Thayer's mother opened an ostensibly sterile closet with clearly contaminated hands. "In some, staff are required to wash their hands for two minutes before entering a unit. How many people do you think wash their hands for two solid minutes? That's how these infections spread."

Another study found bacteria in 75 percent of the rooms of patients with MRSA, and on the uniforms of 65 percent of nurses who had performed procedures on patients with MRSA earlier that day. Shockingly, MRSA bacteria was also found on 42 percent of hospital personnel who had not even touched such patients, but had touched contaminated surfaces.

Don't hug the staff.

The HAI risk for hospital visitors "is a really important and underestimated issue," declares McCaughey, who says she once met a woman who had most of her hand amputated after contracting MRSA through a cut while visiting a sick friend.

McCaughey exhorts hospital administrators to enforce rigorous cleaning protocols and discourage children from visiting. She applauds the 27 state laws now on the books requiring hospitals to track and disclose their HAI rates. Delaware's Hospital Infections Disclosure Act, for example, penalizes noncompliant hospitals with fines and yanks their licenses.

"And shame on the CDC for not updating their statistics often enough to show people how bad this crisis really is. They can tell you how many people died last year of heart attacks and the flu, but not how many died of HAIs. That's just wrong. The CDC is not nearly as aggressive about this as it should be."

Picture this: While visiting Dad post-surgery, you sling your backpack over a chair, tap a wall, and/or open the curtains. Then before washing your hands, you idly chew your fingernail or lick donut crumbs off your thumb. It's enough to spawn paranoid fantasies -- which spring from virulent, if microscopic, grains of truth.

Visiting the sick is compassionate. In Judaism, it's considered a mitzvah: a good deed that helps enact tikkun olam, the process of repairing a shattered world.
Perform it at your own risk.

 

Anneli Rufus is the author of several books, most recently The Scavenger's Manifesto .

 

 

Why do Muslim women cover their hair?

One of the sights that disgusts me is that of a woman with a headscarf. Not very long time ago one rarely saw Muslim females go around with their hair covered. Now they all do it and as time has gone by they even cover their entire face, as well as putting scarves on children. It seems Muslims, instead of being more enlightened, are going backwards, religion having completely taken hold of them . Now I am not concerned here about what their holy book, the Quran, says or does not say. The Quran is definitely not the work of any God; it is the work of Muhammad himself, embellished later on by his followers. There is ample evidence for that if one does a little study of historical documents as well as of the Quran itself. I am simply concerned about the logic of not showing one's hair.

What has hair got to do with how good a person is. Who does the hair of a female offend? God? Certainly not, for if it did the almighty (if he existed), would have made sure that all females were born bald. You cannot give a person hair and then say to them: Don't show them to everybody! That would make God very stupid, wouldn't it and God by definition cannot be stupid.

Certainly hair makes a person attractive to the opposite sex and so the argument goes that that person is more likely to be sexually attacked. If that is so why isn't there an epidemic of sexual assaults against non-Muslim women?

And why are Muslim men not required to wear the scarves? Okay, they are unlikely to be thrown down and raped by a woman. But women do look at attractive men and they have ways to get a man to sleep with them if they wanted to. In fact it doesn't take much to seduce a man, if she really wanted to. So if the purpose was to protect a woman against a man with a headscarf, then a man too should be protected with it against the advances of a woman. All this is just another example of Islam considering women to be inferior to men. The following Quranic text (4.34) actually confirms this. What is more, Islam advocates violence against women:

"Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them. Surely God is high, supreme."


(For a proper understanding of their religion, Muslims should read "Muhammad, a biography of the prophet of Islam" by Maxime Rodinson.)

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Why Danes Are So Much Happier Than Americans.

Kerry Trueman, the author of this article, is the co-founder of EatingLiberally.org

Danish happiness has been attributed to their legendary income equality -- but there's more to it than that

Americans may be deeply divided about what ails our country, but there's no denying we're a nation of unhappy campers.

Danes, on the other hand, consistently rank as some of the happiest people in the world, a fact attributed at least in part to Denmark's legendary income equality and strong social safety net.

Forbes recently cited another possible factor; the Danes' "high levels of trust." They trust each other, they trust 'outsiders,' they even trust their government. 90% of Danes vote. Tea party types dismiss Denmark as a hotbed of socialism, but really, they're just practicing a more enlightened kind of capitalism.

In fact, as Richard Wilkinson, a British professor of social epidemiology, recently stated on PBS NewsHour, "if you want to live the American dream, you should move to Finland or Denmark, which have much higher social mobility."

While we debate whether climate change is real and a tax on unhealthy foods is nanny state social engineering, the Danish are actually trying to address these problems head on.

They can afford to, because they don't spend all their waking hours worrying about whether they're about to lose their job, or their house, or how they're going to pay their student loans, or their health insurance premiums.

Could Danish-style democracy catch on here at home? If the way to a nation's heart is through its stomach, there may be hope. After all, the hottest trend on the culinary horizon these days is the new Nordic Cuisine, "which seeks to turn the culinary dial back toward the natural world," as the New York Times reported a few weeks back.

One of the pioneers of this movement is the dynamic Danish chef and climate change activist Trine Hahnemann, whose latest book is The Nordic Diet. Trine has a genius for creating earthy, easy, elegant meals, but she's equally passionate about cooking up social change while she's at it. I had a chance to get her two cents on our respective cultures when she passed through NYC recently. Following is a condensed version of our conversation:

KT: The cover of your latest book declares that you can "Eat Your Way to Health and Happiness with The Nordic Diet." Americans are so stressed and depressed these days, we're more likely to Eat Our Way to Illness and Misery. And the worse we eat, the worse we feel. Any ideas on how to break out of this vicious cycle?

TH: To change the whole political system takes a long time, so, that's not my first suggestion. Cooking your own meals is essential to staying healthy, because that's the only way you can control your diet. And sharing meals with family and friends, having a sense of belonging, that's a very big part of happiness.

Your meal culture has been blown apart, it's a huge problem. I understand when people say "but I get off work at 8 o'clock and I have to shop and go home and cook," but it's a cycle that just goes around and around and nobody's breaking it. You have to start cooking your own food, and it is doable, even on a lower income.

Danes actually eat a lot of crap, a lot of frozen vegetables, but they cook at home every day and sit down and eat together. This is the main thing in our culture, because take-out and processed convenience foods are more expensive. Fruits and vegetables have to be the cheapest thing, cheaper than eating at McDonald's. It all comes down to economics.

So, we're not these 'holy people' who can manage everything, we just have different ethics. We don't subsidize corn like you do, and also, there is a 25% VAT. And it's socially acceptable to leave work at around 4 or 5 o'clock and pick up your kids from school, go home, share a family meal. From a management point of view, if people have a nice family life, they'll be more productive.

KT: Denmark is famous for having so much less income inequality; do kitchen workers in Danish restuarants make a decent salary?

TH: Yes, a dishwasher in Denmark gets $25 an hour.

KT: Do they get sick days and benefits, too?

TH: Yes, and a pension, and health care, and maternity leave. To me, the more equal your society is, the better it is for everybody. It's not right for a country as rich as yours to have so many poor people. This thing with Americans and taxes, I don't understand it.

I make quite a lot of money, I pay 67% tax on much of it, and I don't mind. I like the idea that the girl who's sitting next to my daughter, whose mother is a cleaning lady, has exactly the same opportunity to get an education that my daughter has. I don't think that's socialism. To me, that's human decency. That girl didn't choose her parents, why shouldn't she have the same opportunities?

KT: The government of Denmark has a very ambitious agenda to eliminate your country's dependence on fossil fuels by 2050. The Danes are early adopters when it comes to conservation and renewable energy.

But Denmark's a relatively small country with a temperate climate, and a homogenous population that doesn't doubt the science on climate change. What lessons do you think the U.S., with all its diversity and division, could learn from your example?

TH: We can't change the world. We're only five million people, but as you say, we're homogenous. Danes trust their government. Over 90% of our population votes. Our news is not as polarized as yours. We're a good place to try out a model.

And cities around the world can draw from our experience. If we don't adapt, there's not going to be water, there's not going to be electricity, why not find solutions now?

KT: How does your role as a climate change activist influence the way you cook?

TH: I use a lot of whole grains, I cut down on meat, I eat very seasonally. In my company, Hahnemann's Køkken, we have a very seasonal profile, our food waste is really low, we use everything that gets into the kitchen.

And I'm working with some engineers to design an energy-efficient professional kitchen. We hope to convince people to buy new equipment. They say, "oh no, it's so expensive," but then you show them how much they could save over ten years on their electricity bill. There are so many old fridges out there that cost a fortune to run.

We need government guaranteed loans to buy new equipment, there are some very interesting models. There's a baker in Germany who has so much leftover bread because people come in at 6 o'clock and demand the same variety he has at 1 o'clock -- that's ridiculous! But he'll lose business if he doesn't cater to that, so all the bread that's left everyday goes into his energy system. He burns it, and that runs the ovens for the next day.

KT: So it's like a kind of biofuel? Does it smell like burned toast?

TH: (laughs) I don't know!

KT: In The Nordic Diet, you note that folks in Denmark bicycle everywhere, to get to work, to go shopping -- entire families routinely go bicycling together, and you don't let lousy weather stop you. You quote the Danish saying, "There is no such thing as bad weather, only wrong clothing."

But even when the weather's fine, you might work up a sweat and get windblown biking around. Here in the U.S., our surgeon general got in hot water when she noted that too many American women don't exercise because they don't want to mess up their hair.

So, is it socially acceptable in Denmark to arrive at one's destination looking like a sweaty, dishevelled mess?

TH: We don't have an obsession with hair like you have over here, we don't have that hair that sits in one place; that's never been in fashion. But if you bicycle ten miles to work on a racing bike, let's say, you'll have your regular clothes in a bag and most work places in Denmark provide a shower and a changing room.

KT: And what about the time that it takes to get changed into your work clothes, are you on the clock? Is it like taking a lunch break?

TH: Yeah, but Danes are like the Swiss, we're always on time. Danes are not late -- being on time is a big part of the culture.

KT: So, it's acceptable to show up with messy hair, but not to be late?

TH: Yes.

KT: How did you feel about the Copenhagen Climate Change talks, and where do you see the climate change movement heading?

TH: I was so disappointed. I was in tears. Our politicians failed us gravely. America and China came with nothing. And Saudi Arabia was working behind the scenes, I'm told, to sabotage it.

It's a shame people aren't more disappointed with the politicians. I am. I'm really disappointed that they can't step up and do the right thing. Why aren't we doing more? I'm not even satisfied with what we're doing in Denmark. I love that we have these goals and I will help to work towards them through the things I can do as a chef and a responsible citizen.

But I think it will have to get much worse before people realize how bad it is. It's potentially just as catastrophic as terrorism -- or worse -- but nobody's paying attention. Everybody's just hoping it will go away.

On the food side, I'm more optimistic, I see a lot of changes, a lot of goodwill, people wanting to cook and eat more ecologically.

We've got to change the way we eat, we've got to change the way we source, we've got to change the way we waste. For me, first of all, it's cutting back on the meat. Eating meat everyday has only been part of our diet since World War II. No matter what, only eat meat twice a week.

And everyone should get a composting bucket, so they can see how much they waste. You could save $2,000 a year if you stopped wasting food. Our grandmothers would never have wasted all that food.

We have to take that older mentality and new technologies and put them together for new solutions. I agree with Food, Inc. director Robert Kenner when he says, "Every time you shop, you vote." That's the best thing you can do as an individual who doesn't hold political office.

aziz anom

Obama, a gigantic fraud, should not be re-elected.

Americans would be wise not to elect Obama again. To do so would send a wrong signal to future candidates that they could worm their way to the White House by making false promises. Lying to the electorate by making fancy speeches, like Obama did, should have a price. Unfortunately there are not many "straight" candidates in the opposing party who would be able to defeat Obama except perhaps Herman Cain. It is lucky that Cain too is black because to have a white candidate opposing Obama would drive black Americans into voting for Obama whether they like him or not. So let us hope Cain is chosen to challenge Obama and let us hope he doesn't turn out to be another fake.

An update to the above: Recently I have learnt a bit more about Cain. He is in favour of water-boarding, a method of torturing people and several women have accused him of sexual harassment. 

A better candidate, I now believe, would be Ron Paul. I like some of his pronouncements. So good luck to him.

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Fasting can cure cancer.

Actually fasting can cure any kind of disease, not just cancer. When we fast, on just fruit or vegetble juice, we give our body a chance to rid itself of all the toxins that have accumulated over the years. Here is a different explanation presented by a certain Tom Coghill from his website at http://www.fasting.ws/juice-fasting/fasting-for-healing/fasting-cancer:

 

"The wasting away seen in cancer is from the cancer consuming the glucose in the blood. As cancer cells increase, the normal cells get less and less nutrition. At this time, caretakers will try to supply extra calories to slow the wasting process, but this is the opposite of what needs to be done. If cancer requires large amounts of glucose for reproduction, then the first defense needs to be reducing glucose in the blood. Healthy cells can live quite well on small amounts of glucose, while the cancer cells have greater calorie needs and are weakened by the lack of glucose. Fasting reduces glucose in the blood. It works best with a combination of water fasting and juice fasting using 2-5 glasses of juice per day followed by periods of eating small portions of fruits and vegetables. This approach will be the opposite of what doctors recommend, and it may be hard to convince a cancer patient of the wisdom of this. I have watched terminal cancer patients die because they put their faith in modern medicine and gave up any form of natural therapy."

Tony Blair finally upsets the Palestinians.

I have long said that the war criminal, Tony Blair, is not the right person to be a peace envoy in the middle east. The Palestinians have finally realised this. Their leaders are now accusing him of "parroting" Israeli demands and want him out. I hope that before he goes he gets a kick in his butt.

 

 

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