Tuesday 23 October 2007

Yesterday

MRSA - The Blood on the hands of the NHS

Yesterday. Yesterday, I intended to write about the defeat of the English Rugby Team by South Africa. Offer commiserations on behalf of the True Brit Welsh and move onto the press coverage in which they were foolishly portraying the South African victory as a unifying event that would bring black and white South Africans together. Dream on, I thought. The country is sinking, slowly but surely sinking and within a few years its plight will equal that of Rhodesia. That is the subject I had planned to expand on yesterday.

But events from home overtook me and I received news of the death of an acquaintance. No, not an acquaintance. A friend. Even if the only time we got together was in the British Legion. He was a friend and along with other family and friends we had spend days out of our lives going to the same weddings and funerals in a Welsh Valley town. Another broken link to the past who can no longer jog memories on a Sunday morning in the Legion.

And his mother survives him. How will she cope? He worshiped her and despite her age he would drag her into the club occasionally for a brown ale and we of course would treat her with the respect she deserved has the mother of a friend.

But he is dead. Gone from us. Stolen from us not by an accident, not by cancer or any of the other things that take us. He was murdered by the NHS. A simple operation should be followed by a fast recovery. Not MRSA and death.

And so my friend becomes another statistic, another name to be added to the 20,000 people who now die of MRSA or E Coli Dificil each year. 20,000 dead and 20,000 familys left grieving because of the ineptitude of this government and NHS staff.

But what kind of super killers are these slayers of men, women and children that they cannot be defeated in a supposedly advanced society? Well they are not super slayers, they are just killers allowed into the hospitals by lazy cleaning staff, visitors and even lazier doctors and nurses who cannot be bothered to wash their hands.

Read beneath or follow this link to see how easy it is to defeat these killers of our family and friends and perhaps one day us.

Hospitals have always been dangerous places , I know because I went in for what should have been a one day operation and came out 4 years later. Cross infection in hospitals is probably now at its highest and most dangerous level since Lister introduced hand washing as a procedure to combat Puerperal Fever(childbirth fever) over 100 years ago. In Listers day doctors would go straight from dissecting cadavers to delivering babies without washing their hands between with the consequence that thousands of mothers died from Puerperal Fever.
Today it is MSRA and E Coli Dificil that are the big killers with E Coli Dificil implicated in twice as many deaths as MSRA. Liam Donaldson, the UK s Chief doctor, blames the poor hand washing culture in the UK for the spread of MSRA in hospitals.

Ironically it is the methods used to combat MSRA that has led to the increase in E Coli Dificil. ; the surgical gels which hospital workers now use to clean hands kill MSRA but are useless against E Coli Dificil. E Coli Dificil is not a new problem , it has been known for years and the best preventative measure is to wash your hands thoroughly in soap and water at regular intervals. The rise in use of antibiotics has raised E Coli Dificil to super-bug level because the antibiotics also kill the good bacteria contained in our guts which combat E Coli, without that good bacteria the E Coli can run wild and is now appearing in increasing numbers on death certificates as cause of death..
Where I live in China, hand washing is carried out fastidiously whenever we come into the house or before we eat anything. Hand washing is almost a religion.
If MSRA and E Coli Dificil are to be beaten in Britain then ,not only medical workers but everyone must relearn Listers lessons and wash their hands thoroughly in soap and water frequently Whatever you touch ; money, handrails etc., that has been touched by others could carry the E Coli Dificil infection. If you do not wash your hands then you not only put yourself at risk but anyone you have contact with.

For example if you are visiting a relative in hospital you can transfer the infection to them and if you shake hands with the person in the next bed you can infect them as well or infect yourself from them.

Medical workers in particular have to relearn the importance of soap and water to wash their hands between attending to patients, even if only making their bed more comfortable. It is not uncommon to see a nurse walking from bed to bed fluffing up pillows or attending to other needs of patients but you rarely see them wash their hands between patients-it is little wonder these infections have spread so rapidly.

Another dangerous practice also observed is seeing nurses wearing their uniforms to travel to work in ; thereby carrying infections on them into our hospitals.
Listers’ pragmatic procedures saved thousands of lives; he must be turning in his grave at ther the thought modern society has been stupid enough to ignore the lessons taught and practiced for over a hundred years.
Biological weapons are the most terrifying weapons of all; the thought of terrorists spreading Anthrax or Botulinus is frightening but we are spreading an infection with a killing power just as hazardous. Why ; Sheer laziness or ignorance?
Protect yourself and your family-wash your hands regularly and thoroughly with soap and water.

But what else has changed besides hygiene habits in the last 30 years, to increase the number of our fellow citizens dieing unnecessarily? MRSA/Edef deaths have increased from less than 300 a year to 20,000 a year remember?

The size of hospitals. We used to have community hospitals that were easily managed and cleaned. Where local staff took a pride in their hospital and where very often the patients were known to the nursing staff as either friends or family of friends and so received the best of care. A nurse would die of shame if just one of her patients developed bed sores. Such was their pride in their work and hospital.

But those days are gone. We have the super hospitals managed by politically appointed people who care more about cutting costs in order to ensure their salaries are topped up with big fat bonuses and their inflation proof pensions topped up on a regular basis.

To these people, patients are not human beings, they are numbers and are treated in the same shameful way of battery hens where deaths from poor care are accepted. Besides they have private health care plans.

But there is another killer lose on the wards. Multiculturalism. We are told that the health service could not survive without all the immigrant nurses and outsourced cleaning staff to do the work. Fiddlesticks. Complete and utter tosh.

Were we to deport all the illegal immigrants swamping the NHS, we could soon start to manage the hospitals properly. We would no longer need (if we ever did) this army of overseas workers who or are depriving True British Doctors and Nurses of jobs.

Do you think a nurse, doctor or cleaner from overseas gives a damn about your Uncle Burt or feels pride in the huge hospitals they work in? Of course not. To them the patients are just something to be ignored untill they can finish work for the day. And if they do not care about the patients then why take the time to wash their hands? It is not their friend who is dieing and it not their friend who died yesterday.

Update

You can get details of how the massive NHS pension funds are now costing every family in the UK over £8,000 here.


No comments: