Sherry Chandler

LEGACIES READING AT THE CARNEGIE CENTER

Tuesday, Mar. 6, 6:30 pm
FREE
The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning
251 West Second Street, Lexington
(859) 254-4175
www.carnegieliteracy.org

The Carnegie Center’s annual Legacies Reading will spotlight the essays, poems, personal stories, and memoirs of twelve talented writers over the age of 55. Readers will include the winner of the Legacies Medallion, donated in memory of Carole Pettit. FREE and open to the public. For more information about this and other writing contests at the Carnegie Center, call (859) 254-4175 or visit www.carnegieliteracy.org

Readers will include my friend, Karen Koegler, an excellent poet and an excellent reader.

Also, Green River Writers’ own David Snell.

Look at this story from the Washington Post:

The government is on track to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency’s own expert advisers that the decision will be dangerous for people.

The drug, called cefquinome, belongs to a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine’s last defenses against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has been approved in the United States for use in animals.

The American Medical Association and about a dozen other health groups warned the Food and Drug Administration that giving cefquinome to animals would probably speed the emergence of microbes resistant to that important class of antibiotics, as has happened with other drugs. Those super-microbes could then spread to people.

…

Yet by all indications, the FDA will approve cefquinome this spring. That outcome is all but required, officials said, by a recently implemented “guidance document” that codifies how to weigh the threats to human health posed by proposed new animal drugs.

The wording of “Guidance for Industry #152″ was crafted within the FDA after a long struggle. In the end, the agency adopted language that, for drugs like cefquinome, is more deferential to pharmaceutical companies than is recommended by the World Health Organization.

And then look at this story from the Arizona Republic that was featured on I See Invisible People:

A young man sits in a locked room, windows covered, in the detention ward at Maricopa Medical Center, under sheriff’s guard.

He is not allowed a TV, a radio, a cellphone, a shower or visitors. A video camera catches his every move.

His floormates are criminals, including a suspect in the killing of a police officer. He has been isolated here for eight months and is expected to remain much longer, perhaps until he dies.

But Robert Daniels is not charged with any crime. He has tuberculosis. And he is under court-ordered confinement because he violated the rules of voluntary quarantine, exposing others to a potentially deadly illness.

Daniels is afflicted with a TB strain so dangerous that he has never met his appointed lawyer, Robert Blecher, who describes the situation as “extremely unusual.”

When your child develops an infection and the doctors tell you there is only one drug that will cure it, I am here to tell you that a chill sets in around your heart that doesn’t go away for a long time. When administration of that drug requires your child to wear a catheter that leads into his heart and requires absolute sterility, when this catheter has to be worn for months, the chill is there. When the infection returns years later and your child has to be isolated because he carries a biohazard, the chill returns. It returns when a simple case of appendicitis requires weeks of open-wound care because the doctors consider it dangerous, in his case, to close the incision.

My child’s case was not as extreme as Mr. Daniels’. My child had a good outcome finally but I am left with such a fear of hospitals and needles that I have a hard time convincing myself to get a flu shot.

And still I know people who bitch because doctors will no longer casually prescribe them an antibiotic for a bad cold — a condition that antibiotics cannot actually treat, except perhaps through the placebo effect.

This is serious stuff, people. We should not be approving this drug. Being rich will not protect you from these super bugs. Hospitals are full of them — that’s where my son got his.

Having gold-plated health coverage will not protect you — though it might keep you from being treated the way Mr. Daniels is being treated.

This is not a terrorist threat. We are doing this to ourselves because we think we can outsmart and control nature.

And we elected a government that thinks money is god.