Attention Sick People!

Enough is enough.

Really.

Since 1665 we've more-or-less understood that live things are made of cells. Please forgive my sacrifice of accuracy to the overall point. Since 1673 we've known about microbes...roughly...those are the bad guys. In general, you don't want any microbes you are not already born with. We're not going to argue vaccination since, really, everyone more or less gets vaccinated to the important things somehow. And we aren't going to trample on my argument because we think probiotics saved the planet...they weren't born yesterday, either. I'll say it again. Microbes are bad.

Time passes.

1840's come around and we start to notice that hand-washing prevents more deaths in birth mothers and their babies. It only takes twenty more years to determine that it helps all those other patients, too. (You've just gotta wonder about that one because it took 20 years??!?). In 1865, Pasteur says, "Microbes are bad!" Officially. Two years later, Dr. Lister makes Listerine famous by observing that chemicals kill microbes and we are down the garden path...

Somewhere in there someone said that it was also healthier to be clean. So we all started doing that, too.

Unfortunately, the pre-emptive garden path ends before 1900 with the idea that gloves in surgery would be cool. And except for refinements on a theme we can't do much else before you get sick.  We do know, though, that there are essentially two ways to get microbes from another individual. That's right, they generally require donors to carry them around. The first is contact. There are several *methods* of contact, so really there are more than two methods of transmission, but this is a blog and some of them are really gross. If said microbe requires that you contact another person using a specific *method* the simple thing to do is...?

Don't contact them. Ta da! The chemicals/cleanliness/hand washing part helps, of course, but essentially you are preventing contact by doing all that wonderful stuff. A few things have turned a healthy glare in the direction of both our chemicals and our hand-washing and "Harrumph" 'd that whole idea into oblivion somewhat, but you really have to go grovel in a hospital to find those. The second transmission category, though, is the one that kicks my tail most often. I think. Airborne. Someone exhales them. You inhale them. Solution?

Simple. Don't breathe.

No seriously. Enough already. Don't breathe. This is my air too. It's probably enough that I have to inhale your cigarette smoke every time I exit a building, but to add insult to injury, you insist the world will not rotate if you give it a rest while heaving up lung-fulls of crap? The real kicker is that more often than not I'm leaving my domicile (my friendly world of microbes) to be amidst volunteers or cancer patients and that's where I pick it up. And for crying out loud, while I do agree on the over-prescription of antibiotics leading to resistance (Faster. I think we still would have trained them just not as fast.), if you are seriously febrile...you qualify.

Pass It On?
Give The Gift Off Life?
If You Share You Care?

At least I feel like blogging,
Scat