These guys seem to suggest Socialism is the way to beating MRSA:
OSLO, Norway – Aker University Hospital is a dingy place to heal. The floors are streaked and scratched. A light layer of dust coats the blood pressure monitors. A faint stench of urine and bleach wafts from a pile of soiled bedsheets dropped in a corner.
Look closer, however, at a microscopic level, and this place is pristine. There is no sign of a dangerous and contagious staph infection that killed tens of thousands of patients in the most sophisticated hospitals of Europe, North America and Asia this year, soaring virtually unchecked.
The reason: Norwegians stopped taking so many drugs.
Twenty-five years ago, Norwegians were also losing their lives to this bacteria. But Norway’s public health system fought back with an aggressive program that made it the most infection-free country in the world. A key part of that program was cutting back severely on the use of antibiotics.
Now a spate of new studies from around the world prove that Norway’s model can be replicated with extraordinary success, and public health experts are saying these deaths — 19,000 in the U.S. each year alone, more than from AIDS — are unnecessary.
Excellent solution. We are going to be treating a potentially fatal staff infection…by not treating you. Oh what a wonderful system! While we are at it, lets just lock up individuals with communicable diseases lest we risk them spreading.
It’s more of common sense than socialism, really. In order to cover their asses and get worried moms out of the ER for every little sniffle their kids have, doctors will prescribe antibiotics even for colds. This has caused an accelerated evolution of drug-resistant bacteria. Overcleanliness too has caused problems. Antibacterial hand soaps have contributed.
The solution is to let our bodies do the fighting for certain things. Otherwise, we become the evolutionary accelerant.
I don’t see why libertarians should mock this. That too many antibiotics and too much cleanliness is creating resilient strains of bacteria that are far more dangerous to us than the garden variety bacterias is a clear case of the unintended consequences of interventionism, and the principles of evolutionary biology, which in my mind have clear parallels in economics.
There is a marginalist principle at work here. If we kill 90% of the bacterias with disinfectants, it stands to reason that the 10% that survive are the strongest individuals. Now they have all the room in the world to multiply and take over. The competition for food is a lot less severe now that we killed all their weaker brethren they were fighting over the living space with. A miniature re-enactment of the Cambrian Explosion really. Do this often enough and something like MRSA will appear sooner or later. The weaker individuals we so mercilessly kill in the name of hygiene are actually our allies - they aren’t nearly as virulent and likely to kill patients, and they keep the stronger members in check by fighting over resources with them. Just like a market works best with many competing firms, your skin works best with many competing microbes.
Also, the liberal use of antibiotics and the extreme excessive use of all kinds of cleaning products endemic in western societies, rather than allowing the immune system of the human body to keep it’s resiliency and do it’s naturally assigned function every day is to me the biological equivalent of saying that markets don’t work and need to be constantly interfered in by wise planners.
Of course, medicine has it’s place. Cleanliness is a virtue, especially when it comes to surgeries. But there are diminishing returns to scale at play here, and there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. I don’t think anyone is advocating a return to 18th century surgical practices here, when doctors didn’t see the point in ever washing their hands. But the fact is that for just about all people, soap and hot water are all the cleaning products they need.
Kudos to the Norwegians for actually choosing the capitalist way to handle MRSA
