I got this in an email, and found it very interesting. It sort of shows where priorities are these days:

As violence in Iraq spreads,
As the dollar plunges,
As money runs out for the National Park Service,
As global warming infects our environment,
As the Tongass National Park will soon be denuded of trees,
As the deficit deepens,
As more children are uninsured for health care,
the New Congress is passing legislation that will allow doctors and health providers to be excused from training in abortion procedures which could include miscarriages, etopic pregnancies, tubal ligations, and other reproductive problems. I wonder if these Senators have similar plans for vasectormies and prostrate problems.

Perhaps Congress feels that this war on women will so popular that we will be distracted from all our other problems.

Regardless how one feels about terminating a pregnancy, not training future doctors how to perform these procedures is certainly a dangerous precedent. For example, sometimes a D&C, one of the procedures used to terminate pregnancies, is used for a wide variety of other reproductive health problems, including incomplete miscarriages. Are we going to deskill physicians just because this is a procedure that can be used to terminate a pregnancy? If a woman is bleeding heavily from a fibroid, for example, and shows up at an ER., what will they tell her? Sorry, madam, but our doctor on call never learned how to take care of that.

Also, this obsession with abortion is mind boggling, considering the pressing problems facing our country. Especially, health problems. Why don’t they put this much passion, time, energy, effort and money into legislation that will help the children who are already here and living in this country? Child welfare services in most states and cities are pathetically underfunded, understaffed, have archaic equipment, and as a result, children slide through the cracks ever day. And not only do they slide through cracks, they hit rock bottom and many end up dead. Little corpses, dead for no apparent reason, except for the incompetence of child welfare services. And again, much of the incompetence lies within cuts in services, funding, poor salaries for caseworkers (which leads to an inability to attract competent people to the task) and so on.

This is just one example. We have children living on the street, children without health insurance, children who are hungry, but yet, Congress is concerned over whether or not doctors should be able to refuse training in certain procedures which are part of their professional training.

Where would we be without antibiotics? True, they’ve been overused, abused, misused, inappropriately used, not used often enough, the wrong kind used too often and the right one not often enough…and today we are experiencing a major health crisis stemming from our poor use of antibiotics. Sometimes called superinfections, they are caused by antibiotic resistant bacteria. Never did scientists and doctors dream that tiny microbes would outsmart us, but they have. As fast as we can develop new agents, they become resistant. And many of them are multidrug resistant, and reports have filtered in of pathogens who are resistant to everything.

Today is an anniversary of sorts in the history of antibiotics. Actually, we could say that it is the very beginning of the pharmaceutical class of drugs known as antimicrobial agents. Their birthday, so to speak. On his day in 1939, Howard Florey, an Australian pathologist, applied to the Rockefeller Foundation to study penicillin and other bacteria.

Penicllin had actually first been identified in the 19th century, and later by Alexander Fleming in 1928, but not much came of it until Florey began his tenure. He transformed penicillin from an interesting observation into a marketable drug that arrived just in time to treat thousands during WW II.

Florey shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in physiology with biochemist Ernst Chain, who worked with him on producing penicillin, and with Alexander Fleming, who had stumbled upon it years before.

Anyway, happy birthday penicillin. Ironic that at the moment, I am writing an article about preventing infections due to antibiotic resistant bacteria.