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Happy Earth Day

Thanks.

The hospital staff let an ordinary but absolutely critical parameter get and stay out of bounds through last night. It's a devastating, devastating error.

We caught this same mistake previously & insisted it be correctly promptly to avoid exactly these consequences, staying into the wee hours of the night to be sure. But this time our guard was down, we weren't there, and they let it go.

They're good people, almost all of them good to excellent at their jobs. But it's a bureaucracy, where the doers follow unclear instructions issued by absent authorities. It's all open-loop. Errors fly through their net constantly, undetected, unchecked. And if unexpected things happen on a Saturday night, no one reacts until an authority takes notice the next day.

It has been a hard day, nearly as hard as they come.

James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat
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You don't see Richard Brautigan's work reference very often. This poem title seems to have resonated with today's culture.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

You show no understanding of even basic population growth or any of the resource issues. The fact that gas is under two dollars a gallon is completely irrelevant. There is no reason to expect that technology will continue to avert significant problems in the future unless we limit population growth. Even with the slower growth seen in the US lately, our population will double in 70 years to over 600 million, then in another 70 years to 1.4 billion.

Other parts of the globe are much more dense and growing much faster.

That is the problem and technology will become irrelevant if the growth rate does not change.

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Rick C
Reply to
rickman

Lets then discuss your claim. I'll copy it here:

"When they pulled off a world-wide ban on DDT they thought they were saving birds. Maybe they were, but do you think most Democrats of the time would have gone along if they knew malaria would return and kill

50 million people in Africa and Asia? But if you ask a Democrat today (I have) if the DDT ban was a mistake they say, "Well no..." Of what importance are 50 million people when you might have saved 100 million birds? And you think we're co-opted by whack jobs."

There has never been a world-wide ban on DDT. Even after the EPA banned it for agricultural use within the USA it remained available there for disease control, and it was used for that purpose. e.g. in 1979 it was used to control fleas carrying Typhus in Louisiana, & California Department of Health Services used DDT to suppress fleas that carried bubonic plague.

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Some individual countries did impose complete bans, others such as India have continued to manufacture and use it in significant quantities. The current global use is 4000 - 5000 tonnes per year.

Early this century The Stockholm Convention eventually allowed it to continue to be used for disease control.

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DDT is not a magic bullet, many mosquito populations have developed resistance to it, see page 10 of the last url.

I suggest the whack jobs that fed you a load of nonsense about DDT really are quite close to your position on the political spectrum.

Regards Malcolm.

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remove sharp objects to get a valid email address
Reply to
Malcolm Moore

Nice to see that someone does background reading.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

I was in hospital last fall for injury to my foot. I have a disorder, Myelodysplastic Syndrome and the med for that lowers my platelet count. One of the docs there prescribed a blood thinner, luckily I asked what the med I was about to receive was and I questioned the wisdom of a blood thinner to a patient with low platlet count and they stopped that one. Scary place to be avoided if possible. Eric F

Reply to
Ingvald44

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l.

Humans are complicated, and there's plenty of room for human error.

Quite a bit of my time as an engineer has been spent finding and fixing err ors I'd made,and rather more finding and fixing errors other people had mad e.

In hospitals people are working under greater pressure, dealing with a much more variable product, and it's not surprising that the occasional error h appens.

Granting that you have to be pretty sick get into a hospital, it isn't surp rising that some of these errors kill people. It still wouldn't be a good i dea to look after your nearest and dearest at home when they got really sic k.

If James Arthur's ideas about medicine matched his ideas about politics and economics, he'd be complaining about poor leech management, rather than sl oppy prescription of blood pressure drugs (which is what came very close to killing my father, as year or so before his cancer killed him).

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

That is much too close to exactly what happened, several times, in one form or another. But after all those catches, this one time, late Saturday night, we weren't there to catch it. And one time, just one time, is all it takes.

We do not yet know the full toll, but it is high my friend, very high.

James Arthur

Reply to
dagmargoodboat 

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Over 1% of the population of the US is in prison. 

Things aren't looking so good. 

John Fields
Reply to
John Fields

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