Jun. 01, 2007 - 20:38 MDT

ON THE KNIFE EDGE

Science has come far since I was a kid, especially medical science. Yet it seems that as medicine finds cures for ailments, germs, bacteria and viruses keep mutating and becoming resistant to antibiotics.

Even though in recent times doctors have been being very careful prescribing them and some folks take the full dosage and some folks take them 'til the feel a tad better, much damage was done in the early days of antibiotics which I think let mutation begin.

Now we have at National Jewish Medical and Research Center here in the Denver Area a victim of that dread disease, Tuberculosis. The drug resistant kind.

He is now in the right place.

Authorities are busy trying to locate people with whom he came in contact in order to do whatever is necessary, testing and isolating and such.

It appears that there is enough blame to go around, himself and authorities. And blame is sort of a useless type of thing. Everybody in a giant circle, each pointing the the finger at the one on the right (or left).

My personal feeling is that the entire medical sphere should tighten up on their operations at airports, seaports and our borders. Because the next person who slips through could be carrying a more horrendous disease than tuberculosis. We've, most of us, seen movies of that genre and went home scared -- or at least it gave me pause.

There were several articles in the Rocky Mountain News of May 31, dealing with the aspects of the case. But one in particular I wish to quote a few phrases, the article itself is by John C. Ensslin and the words I shall quote were spoken by Dr. Tom Noel and Debra Faulkner had this to say, Quote:

"According to Noel and Faulkner, many children were orphaned by parents who came seeking the cure, but never found it." One of every four deaths in Colorado was attributed to TB in the 1920s and 1930s, and one of every three Coloradans had an active form of the disease." Unquote

TB in many cases was kept secret, much as unwanted pregnancies, alcoholism, and insanity back in those days. The folks who had the Cleaners and Dyers business across the alley from us had a small residence built in back of their shop, a relative of theirs lived there. We hardly ever saw her. Then we didn't ever see her. Once he and I were going down the alley and noticed a door was ajar there. We peeked in and saw that there was no furniture there, so as curious boys we moseyed in to survey the situation, we noticed a box of papers and things and sticking up were negatives, large ones. Well neither one of us was an accomplished diagnostician, but in those X-rays it showed that one lung was just about gone.

We swore each other to secrecy, that we would never tell just how we contracted TB, because we felt that would be what was going to happen to us.

Thinking back to my early years, I realize that many folks who were taken to the hospital, never returned and of those who did became invalids for life.

Even as science has made great strides, so has disease and today we live ON THE KNIFE EDGE . . . . . . . . . .

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