http://www.suffering4art.com
I’m very NYC focused here, but this is really freaking me out. Because of gaybashing, San Francisco’s Castro, the gayest neighborhood in the world, is shutting down on Halloween and campaigning to tell people to stay away. Wow.
CDC: Drug-resistant staph deaths may surpass AIDS toll. Scary stuff. One friend of mine had the flesh-eating type and is now missing a huge chunk of his back.
I didn’t write up Folsom Street Fair yet, but Calico did and her post has lots of photos including a couple of me!
Submit your films and videos to CineKink by November 15. More info here.
People change. They are affected by positive experiences. Someone who told me no a couple of years ago has now said yes. That makes me very happy.
1 response so far ↓
1 Wendy // Oct 21, 2007 at 11:59 pm
I have many opinions about drug-resistant bacterias, and how our uberclean and uberparanoid culture is contributing to the problem.
For example – did you know that there are now lots of parents who are NOT having their children immunized for measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, and all the old ‘childhood diseases’? These diseases have NOT been eradicated, not by a long shot. Yet paranoid adults think its going to somehow hurt their children if they get these vaccines.
The latest popular myth is that the vaccines contain mercury that will damage a person, which is no longer true.
Not getting vaccinated causes the diseases, which are NOT eradicated diseases, to spread more. Whooping cough actually made a return to my old primary school, when my youngest sister was a student there.
Look at what happened in New York when they closed all the T.B. clinics – people who still hadn’t finished their rounds of medication stopped, didn’t finish, and got sicker. The bacteria became more resistant. Now, T.B. is slowly becoming more prevalent and harder to cure. (at the best of times, its something like two years on drugs that have to be taken on time – and it takes lots of work on the part of the gov’t and medical community to make sure these people take their drugs when they have to, because its not just a personal risk, its a public health risk.)
Then we have people dousing their hands with handsan all over the place. Those products don’t kill any of the really icky vicious germs – they usually only kill the few common cold germs (that we are capable of fighting off) and the harmless bacteria that live on our skin. They don’t do anything against, say, drug resistant staph, or the flesh eating strep. Soap and water are *really* all you need – they actually physically knock off most of the bacteria.
People also over use antibiotics in hand soaps and dish soaps, to the same effect. The only time you really need those things are when you have wounds – given the option, the only time I use antibacterial soap is when cleaning a booboo, or cleaning a fresh bodymod.
Along with all this, there are people like my mother, who demand, and get, from irresponsible doctors, antibiotics for everything – when the majority of illnesses that people demand them for are viral.
I’ll stop now. Please don’t trip over my soapbox on the way out.
Check out “The New Killer Diseases” by Elinor Levy and Mark Fischetti.
http://www.amazon.com/New-Killer-Diseases-Evolution-Threatens/dp/0609609947/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/103-0483899-8125443?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193028145&sr=8-2
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