Interesting reaction to Tuesday’s post from my friend Perry Metzger. Perry, with his permission:
My
biggie is the number of people who die from medical errors and bad
hygiene in hospitals. It’s thousands a day globally. Unlike the global
murder problem, this one is probably quite straightforwardly fixed by
improving process. My #2 is the mosquito borne
disease problem, where something like 3000 people die a day, possibly
much more as we really don’t know — this is now easily fixed, though
anti-GMO hysteria will probably delay the fix until after literally ten
or twenty million more people have died.
READER COMMENTS
Sam Bruce
Aug 24 2016 at 11:23pm
In medicine as in other things, there’s rarely anything straightforward about improving process.
Glen Smith
Aug 25 2016 at 8:21am
If these problems were easy to fix, the market would have no moral high ground.
Gongtao
Aug 25 2016 at 10:53am
I have been working in medical facilities for 25 years, and I can tell you that everyone who works in that setting has gotten the message that hand washing is important. And there are many, many error prevention systems in place. I would love to see improvement in these areas, but I believe all the low-hanging fruit has been picked already and marginal improvements are going to be difficult to achieve.
ThaomasH
Aug 25 2016 at 3:52pm
I’m pretty anti GMO hysteria, but I do not think that is the only think standing in the way of a genetic attack on mosquitoes.
The Original CC
Aug 29 2016 at 10:02am
Ok, maybe anti-GMO hysteria isn’t to blame, but anti-“let’s wipe out an entire species” is. I’m not joking. We could probably wipe out all mosquitoes on earth and – according to some stuff I’ve read – the impact on the ecosystem wouldn’t be so bad. Meanwhile lots of human misery (including itchy mosquito bites) would be prevented.
But I think people freak out about proposals like this. Too bad.
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