America's
Concerns

SARS

Yes, SARS is another flu, I would argue with disgust on the phrase "just" another virus. It is not just another virus to the people on a ventilator or that people that died. The problem is in the United States there MAY well be that attitude that you just expressed in your own hospital staff.

Now if you go into a such a hospital, this is a THEORETICAL scenario only, BECAUSE IN CALIFORNIA WE COULD NOT TELL YOU IF IT WAS TRUE OR NOT, because of corporate compliance papers we have ALL had to sign for SILENCE ... and you had just slipped on a stair and fractured your ankle. You very well might be placed right next to a patient who has pneumonia.

The next day you have pneumonia, then your kidneys fail, then your heart sac fills with fluid, then you have a tube stuck down your throat, and external pacemaker put on, and we have a 50/50 chance of turning you around so you don't die. What will you die of? ... whatever organ gave out first. Then the next person comes in, maybe they have an appendix going bad, suddenly they have pneumonia ... and the next, and the next. DEATH is a really big word to you on that ventilator.

It is NOT just another flu then. And maybe you or your family hope someone will help you ... they can't say anything ... they have signed corporate compliance papers to make sure they never do. And another patient comes in ... and another.

And, yes, the unemployment is terrible. And 60 million people in the state of California are without health insurance. But two bills just began through the California Senate to help them have health insurance.

And as long as the corporate silence papers are on ALL health care workers in California, we can never tell you why those bills are so important. We can't even flag you away from that hospital ... where more and more people are dying. It might cause the hospital to lose money, you see.

Is it just another flu???? Something that happens just in the Asian countries and, therefore, we don't have to worry? SARS just mutated into two forms, the second might be more lethal and deadlier than the first. In my THEORETICAL scenario, awake health care but silenced workers ... could have told you that six weeks ago. Is it just another flu???

Panic is not the answer. The answer is making sure those patients are in proper isolation. It is in not silencing the staff and making sure the hospitals are reporting such a said scenario to WHO and CDC so money can be moved to protect that community and monitor those patients and the doctors and staff who then go back out to the community ... wearing the same clothes they wore taking care of the 30 atypical, dying pneumonia patients they saw that day.

Astraea