Canadian health gaffes costly
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Updated: July 07, 2009 10:06 PM
The news has been buzzing with all sorts of animal flu pandemic hype over the past few months, but a ray of light emanating from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency cut through some of the gloom and doom this week as they gave the all clear on avian influenza.
Maybe now we can get to work on some of the other issues plaguing Canadians and our fractured healthcare system?
Steve Thomson, the Minister of Agriculture and Lands said recently that the Province had learned a lot from the avian flu incidents earlier this decade, and as a result, the government managed to save the poultry industry worth approximately $2.65 billion to the B.C. economy.
We can ensure an entire industry is safe, but we couldn’t seem to get a handle on a rampant explosive diarrhea infection in a Nanaimo hospital. Unfortunately, the illness has proven fatal five times since it was first discovered last July. That’s July 2008. Yes, you read it correctly – and the infection was uncontrolled until May of this year.
How is this possible in a day and age where every Canadian has access to hand sanitizers and clean water?
The Centre for Disease Control recently concluded that overcrowded rooms, bathrooms, sinks and unhygienic cloth furniture and curtains in rooms where sick people stayed resulted in the unchecked spread of the illness at Nanaimo General. Cuts to the cleaning staff and the use of inexpensive (and ineffective) cleaning solutions were also a factor.
I don’t want to blame him because he’s new to the position and inherited this problem from the previous ministry, but Health Minister Kevin Falcon said that B.C. hospitals generally perform above the national average on infection control. Doesn’t he realize that all it takes is a few strokes of a red pen here and there and then all of a sudden you have a facility that falls below that average? While averages and such are great for bean counters and mathematicians, we as Canadians would like to think that our hospitals and health authorities strive for more than an average grade.
I have to eat my words, however, because in my naiveté I had incorrectly assumed that we live in a day and age where every Canadian has access to hand sanitizers and clean water. I was wrong. I’m talking about Health Canada’s latest gaffe in which hand sanitizers were withheld from flu-stricken reserves because they contain alcohol and there were concerns from the feds that the people on the reserves would drink it. I’m not kidding, you can’t make this stuff up.
Thousands of bottles of the cleanser were held back while bureaucrats decided if it was in the best interest of Aboriginals to offer the alcohol-based sanitizer.
Many people live on reserves where conditions are even worse than a Nanaimo hospital, creating optimal conditions for a virus like the swine flu because of houses filled beyond capacity and a dearth of clean water.
I wonder what the federal government’s reaction would have been if these reserves were worth approximately $2.65 billion to the Canadian economy?
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