I spend my entire day reading medical stories.
Well, that and sports stories; and news stories; and
general interest stories; and gossip . . .
But I do read a ton of medical stories and if I were a
worrier, which I am, of course (is there a living breathing Jewish boy who
isn’t?), I’d be worried because the bad guys – GERMS – are not only making a
comeback, but they seem to be getting the upper hand.
Thus, the medical news this week was filled with stories
about a new form of SARS (very concerning because SARS was a coronavirus, and
those largely untreatable mamzers spread human-to-human (yikes!), 400 new cases
of West Nile virus in the US (no word on Canada), dengue fever in someone in
Florida, a new deadly iteration of meningitis that has killed 4 men who had sex
with other men, a new hemorrhagic fever virus just discovered in Africa, and
those are just the ones that got multiple mentions.
So what’s the good news?
Well, so far that new form of SARS seems to have happened
only to 2 men who caught it either from bats or camels, which is not a risk
most of the rest of us will ever run, and it hasn’t yet been shown to be
transmittable human-to-human, the dengue fever was probably a one-off, the
threat of West Nile seems to be waning, and the authorities are all over that
meningitis outbreak.
The thing is that in this era with such accelerated
ability to transmit a virus around the world because of air travel, and in an
era where health risks have and habits have changed so rapidly, we have to be
more vigilant than ever that the bad guys don’t get the upper hand.
But so far, we seem to be.
The worrier in me – and especially the grandparent part of
me - worries, though: how long will we be as lucky as we’ve been?
