Speaking of Ebola...
Saturday, 9 August 2014 05:47 amThe next time you get the urge to roll your eyes and snark at someone that Ebola isn't really all that contagious, unless you're coming into contact with bodily fluids, just remember:
- According to researchers, 95% of Americans don't wash their hands properly after using the bathroom, i.e. long enough and well enough to kill bacteria after coming into contact with bodily fluids, with soap, or at all.
- According to the CDC, around 99,000 deaths in the US each year involved hospital-acquired infections, because medical personnel get slack about proper hygiene.
- As for the CDC itself, last month it was called out for shipping anthrax to other labs in Ziploc baggies, failing to decontaminate labs where they worked with anthrax, losing samples of both anthrax and a highly contagious and deadly flu, and finding samples of smallpox they'd had forgotten about some 60 years earlier.
Ah, no, wait, the smallpox thing was the USDA - the folks who keep our burgers (relatively) rat turd-free. Because that's better.
In any case, I'm not saying we're all going to die - just that any argument that assumes we're safe because of other people's hygiene is inherently a bad argument.
- According to researchers, 95% of Americans don't wash their hands properly after using the bathroom, i.e. long enough and well enough to kill bacteria after coming into contact with bodily fluids, with soap, or at all.
- According to the CDC, around 99,000 deaths in the US each year involved hospital-acquired infections, because medical personnel get slack about proper hygiene.
- As for the CDC itself, last month it was called out for shipping anthrax to other labs in Ziploc baggies, failing to decontaminate labs where they worked with anthrax, losing samples of both anthrax and a highly contagious and deadly flu, and finding samples of smallpox they'd had forgotten about some 60 years earlier.
Ah, no, wait, the smallpox thing was the USDA - the folks who keep our burgers (relatively) rat turd-free. Because that's better.
In any case, I'm not saying we're all going to die - just that any argument that assumes we're safe because of other people's hygiene is inherently a bad argument.