I’m spitting mad.
Incompetence is one thing. Negligence is worse. Intentional failure is unacceptable.
This past week news stories right across B.C. and Canada, once again, exclaimed a spike in deaths due to invasive group A strep bacteria. At least four children dead in BC. This is the same bug that causes strep throat. The lesser known story is how concurring viral illnesses such as Covid-19, influenza and RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) make the risk of invasive group A strep much riskier.
Meanwhile, because of their failure to appropriately manage our taxpayer dollars, our political and healthcare leaders are in some cases advising us not to go to emerg to limit overcrowding. This is unhelpful and potentially dangerous advice when infections like group A strep can present with mild symptoms and progress to life threatening invasive illness within a matter of hours. Meanwhile, Canada’s top emergency medicine doctors are clear: It is a lack of hospital beds, not the presentation of mild illnesses, that cause our emergency rooms and healthcare systems to be in crisis.
Case in point - almost all of the beds in the Port McNeill and Port Hardy hospitals are currently occupied by non-acute patients - in other words, patients who could be managed in long-term care beds or in the community with appropriate supports. Meanwhile, many of our acute patients - potentially you and me - have to sit in a stretcher in emerg (in Port McNeill since Port Hardy is not open overnight) or be admitted to Campbell River because we don’t have available beds.
So no, don’t question your instinct. If you feel you need to go to emerg, then please go. In my 12 years as a doctor, I still have not found anything more accurate in diagnosis than the concern of an experienced parent.
And yet, public health leaders, politicians and our Island Health authority, are actively spending precious taxpayer attention with advertisements and news conferences about how you should seek the appropriate medical care and not overtax limited medical resources. As if the poor and too-often grossly ineffective use of these resources is our fault as taxpayers and patients. It is not.
Meanwhile, children are dying.
Yes, I am spitting mad.
Oh, and did I mention that these viral respiratory illnesses that predispose to deadly invasive group A strep - Covid, influenza and RSV - can all be reduced and potentially prevented by vaccines? And that their airborne nature can further be reduced by cheap, readily accessible air purifier units like we have at North Island Community Health Centre? We need to be cleaning the air in our daycares and schools - yet our governments are asleep at the wheel instead of managing a well-understood risk.
The esteemed pathologist Rudolf Virchow once said “Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine at a larger scale.”
As doctors, we bear a Hippocratic oath and responsibility to serve our patients and our communities. We can even lose our license to practice - the very ability to feed our families - if we do not heed this responsibility appropriately.
Meanwhile politicians and health authorities are able to run roughshod over patients and communities’ health for any number of self-interested reasons, without bearing responsibility for the individuals they allegedly serve. It’s almost too much.
Demand better. Ultimately we have the keys in a democracy - at each level, it is up to us as taxpayers and voters to hold our elected officials responsible.
For ideas/topics you would like explored, please email suggestions to: alexnatarosMD@gmail.com or find me online Facebook/Twitter “Alex Nataros MD” Note this is Not for personal medical questions – for these you should present to clinic/emerg or call 8-11.