Thursday, May 31, 2007
Dammit, stop insulting our intelligence!
Amazingly, the CDC actually quarantined the TB patient, and even more amazingly announced his name to the public. Both of these steps are tremendous positive advances; for entirely too many years the mythical "privacy right" of patients, which does not exist, was placed above the risk of killing thousands of people, who do exist.
But they still haven't quite grasped the basic notion of telling the truth. They say there is "absolutely no way" Speaker could have acquired this unique pathogen from his father-in-law who worked in CDC.
Don't insult our intelligence. If we were talking about nasty but fairly widespread diseases like meningitis or HIV, such a denial wouldn't be absurd. The connection would then be interesting, maybe suspicious, but the patient could have acquired the virus in many other ways and places. In this case, as with smallpox, the CDC is just about the only place in America where the pathogen exists. ¶ 12:37 PM
Amazingly, the CDC actually quarantined the TB patient, and even more amazingly announced his name to the public. Both of these steps are tremendous positive advances; for entirely too many years the mythical "privacy right" of patients, which does not exist, was placed above the risk of killing thousands of people, who do exist.
But they still haven't quite grasped the basic notion of telling the truth. They say there is "absolutely no way" Speaker could have acquired this unique pathogen from his father-in-law who worked in CDC.
Don't insult our intelligence. If we were talking about nasty but fairly widespread diseases like meningitis or HIV, such a denial wouldn't be absurd. The connection would then be interesting, maybe suspicious, but the patient could have acquired the virus in many other ways and places. In this case, as with smallpox, the CDC is just about the only place in America where the pathogen exists. ¶ 12:37 PM
