Probably many of the people who read this blog have read medical thrillers. Stephen King's THE STAND is one such, as are FOREIGN BODY by Robin Cook and HARVEST by Tess Gerritsen. I don't read these very often--not because they're not gripping or well-written, but because they scare the bejeebers out of me. I get enough doses of scary reality to want to avoid such books. If you like them, that's great! Go ahead and read 'em--I'm not saying don't do it.
I guess what makes them so doggone frightening to me is that my wife is a long-time ER and ICU nurse who is also a CNP, and I hear the horror stories of medicine all too often. It may seem like fiction to you to hear of some of the horrible things that can happen in a hospital: sponges left in patients, doctors operating while intoxicated, nurses failing to connect telemetry so patients die without anyone knowing. The problem is, these things really do happen, so that makes the medical thriller a bit too close to home for me.
How's this for a thriller concept? Doctors discover an antibiotic-resistant infection that spreads easily and is very, very deadly.
"Ha!" you may say. "That's been done, and besides, it's a reality. They call it MRSA, or 'mersa' in the nurse's lingo."
True. All too true. So, let's put a kink in it. Classic MRSA typically is transferred through a wound and/or mucous membrane, by exposure to a person sick with MRSA or his/her body fluids. It is contracted over ninety percent of the time when a person is in a hospital, nursing home, dialysis center or other such place.
So let's make it more suspenseful: the new "bug" is spread through casual contact with physical objects that other infected persons have touched. Remember wa-a-a-ay back when people worried about catching AIDS or VD from a doorknob? Well, would it up the suspense ante if the new bug could literally be caught from a doorknob... or by touching the handle of the shopping cart at WalMart... or from the toilet in the public restroom... or by picking up the hymnal at church?
And would it make it even more horrifying if this new version of the bug often causes necrotization of the tissue (necrotizing fascitis)? (That means that the skin and underlying flesh starts to die and rot--similarly to what happens from the bite of a brown recluse. (Warning: NASTY pictures after that jump!)
Guess what: it is not fiction. This relatively new version of MRSA is called Community Acquired Methicillin-Resistant Staphyloccus Aureus. CA-MRSA, for short.
The nurses at the hospital were warned about this a few months ago, but the warning was emphasized again in today's training. Here's a kicker, too: Purell and other alcohol-based "hand sanitizers" don't do squat to fight this. You know those little dispensers you may have seen near the entrance of your local grocery store (ours have them, anyway) that have what look like baby wipes in them? Those things have a mild form of bleach in them, and that's the only thing that kills the CA-MRSA on surfaces. Standard germicidal wipes with alcohol are useless against CA-MRSA.
Now, for some reason people are worried silly over H1N1 influenza.
Why? Because the pharmaceutical companies have pushed this as a big risk.
Why did they do this? Because they have HUGE stockpiles of influenza vaccine and TamiFlu that they need to sell before it goes out of date.
There are about 290 confirmed cases of H1N1 influenza in the U.S. right now. There has been one death: a Mexican toddler whose immune system was compromised. To me, this is not a pandemic, as sad as the death of a child may be. One death in 286 is a mortality rate of about one-third of one percent
Here are some facts on deaths from MRSA: "In 2005 in the United States alone, 368,600 hospital admissions for MRSA—including 94,000 invasive infections—resulted in 18,650 deaths. The number of MRSA fatalities in 2005 surpassed the number of fatalities from hurricane Katrina and AIDS combined and is substantially higher than fatalities at the peak of the U. S. polio epidemic." (Taken from the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons News.) That is a FIVE percent mortality rate in 2005. The CA-MRSA has developed since that time, so the infection rate is increasing because people are contracting CA-MRSA outside the hospital.
By this point you're probably wondering why in the WORLD I am blogging about this. Well, it does tie to writing and fiction in a number of ways.
- Medical thrillers and medical suspense novels are a big part of the crime fiction scene, and this sort of information is great background info for such novels.
- Reality is often stranger than fiction, and it actually makes the fiction scarier if people face up to the fact that such things can really happen. (For example, don't you think people would find zombie stories scarier if they really believed that they could find a horde of brain-hungry walking corpses in their front yard one night?)
- The scare tactics about the swine flu (H1N1 influenza) are, in my not-so-humble opinion, blown-out-of-proportion statistics and largely fictionalized, and designed to help the pharmaceutical companies rather than help individuals. If the number of cases and mortality rate were any indicators, they would be falling all over themselves to inform people about MRSA and CA-MRSA... oh, but wait! People can use simple antisepsis (washing with bleach water) to avoid MRSA and CA-MRSA, so the pharmaceutical companies wouldn't make much money from that, would they?
- Lastly--if it IS or if it is NOT a scheme to sell flu meds and clear out stockpiles--well, it makes a heck of a story, don't you think?
Oh, and make sure you use one of those antibacterial wipes the grocery stores have to wipe down that shopping cart handle. Believe me, you don't want to catch CA-MRSA.
Later addition, 5/4/09, 11:43 PM: Government says swine flu is no worse than regular flu.
