Reply #46: Interesting views of health care, disease, doctors [View All]

[triguy46]

The first thing that jumped out at me were the expectations that because we have talked with friends, therefore raised our knowledge level about bird flu, we should demand Tamiflu, and if our doc won't prescribe it, go to another. This sounds like self diagnosis, treatment. You can't take tamiflu all the time. It has to be taken within a very short time of being diagnosed. There are docs that will write whatever you want, (the so called good docs), and docs that prescribe based on examination and treatment, who are now the bad guys. Interesting. This reminds me of the antrax days where people were self adminsitering cipro, ignoring the risks and side effects. No matter what you may think you know, if you ain't go the initials behind your name, you're prob not very good at it.

SEcond, being in the business, good luck finding tamiflu. it is becomings scarce, secondary to the feds and brits buying millions of doses, and scared public scaring their docs and trying to stockpile.

Third, Where is the human to human vector? There are all sorts of
viruses out there in animals, a few will affect humans who come in contact, but not all, and even fewer that mutate to be human to human. It can here, and Ifeel the flames, 'you don't know its not gonna happen.' Is our memory so short we cannot remember SARS and SARS hysteria?
There is so much that 'can' happen, earthquakes, asteroids, tsunamis, floods, hurricanes...Buy a weeks worth of soup, a couple cases of water, tape your windows shut and hunker down...

If you want to worry about a real disease that is in your community now, and for which there is very, very limited treatment, ask your doc or public health nurse about methicillin resistant staph aureus, (MRSA). Do you like draining, pus filled open wounds? Flesh eating bacteria? Resistant to antibiotic therapy. Its here, and its real, and people should be worried about it but rather deal with the current bird flu scare.