Lemmings, Line up In Niagara

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In 1988 the road to Oberammergau was quiet.

It wasn't one of the Passion Play years.

As we bicycled through the bucolic countryside I remember thinking how much more isolated it was than most of the other Bavarian villages.

The people of Oberammergau are convinced that their village was spared from the plague in the Middle Ages because God chose not to send them His punishing pestilence for some reason.

I suspect it is more likely that the village was so far out of the way that anyone who was sick died long before they arrived and the villagers themselves must have been self sufficient enough that they didn't need to travel elsewhere.

Which brings me, oddly enough, to the Niagara Health Care system.

We have a problem here. 

People are still dying of C. difficile and as of today two health care workers have also gotten sick.

Worse still a new superbug has appeared.

This year, the Niagara Health Care shut down the emergency trauma centres in the smaller communities. 

The will of politicians on a cost cutting mission, not the people.

A giant new hospital is set to open in Niagara in 2012.

We're going big instead of small.

And that worries me.

I have a feeling that if we don't get the lesson of Oberammergau, we're going to see more and more of these outbreaks and not just in Niagara.


Race you to the cliff?

Related articles

• C. difficile superbug tied to 17th Niagara death (cbc.ca)
• Frustrated Niagara residents speak out about C.difficile concerns (theglobeandmail.com)
• Niagara-area hospital worker infected with C. difficile (theglobeandmail.com)

C. difficile in Niagara

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I'm ashamed of myself for not paying closer attention when the wheels first started to fall off the Niagara Health Care System.

For years I've been reading letters to the editor in the St. Catharines Standard about how dirty the St. Catharines General Hospital is.

To tell you the truth, some of the letters were so unbelievable they caused me to think the writers were exaggerating.

I remember one letter in particular that described blood being left on the floor of a patient's room for days before the overworked cleaning staff got around to mopping it up.

Now I have to accept the fact that those letters might have been true - because Niagara is in the midst of a frightening C. difficile outbreak even though

a)  C. difficile isn't contagious. It is caused by fecal matter being transferred from one person or surface to another.   

 b) a person can get it only if antibiotics he/she is taking have killed off another kind of bacteria in his/her intestines.

Hmmm.

It doesn't sound as if it should be a great problem.

But it has killed at least 17 people in area hospitals since the end of May and many more are sick.

The situation reminds me of the Listeria outbreak in Ontario in 2008. 

That deadly bacteria was hiding so deep inside the meat cutting machines at Maple Leaf Foods it was almost impossible for the company to find it.

I wonder if C difficile is like Listeria, left unchecked for so long, it now lurks in dark, hidden  places, impossible to find and remove even with the most stringent of cleaning programmes.

I don't know the answer to that but I do know that I'll agree to more cut backs

in health care as long as they only involve the folks at the top.

Then there will at least be some justice for the dying and the dead.