Today is a remarkable day in the history of the world. Today in 1781 Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, which ended the Revolutionary War. Napoleon began his retreat from Moscow today, in 1812. And, today the American health care system officially shit the bed.

MRSA is a relatively harmless staph infection which lives on our skin. Unfortunately, MRSA is resisitant to multiple antibiotics and causes SERIOUS illness if it enters the bloodstream. MRSA is a chronic problem in hospitals, where it is spread between patients, staff and equipment in what are known as iatrogenic infections. 

It is the belief of many that MRSA is not so much caused by carelessness, such as doctors not washing their hands between seeing patients or overworked hospital staff cutting corners, although this is surely a contributing factor, as it caused by the reckless and profligate use of antibiotics overprescribed by doctors, who know that the quickest way to get rid of a patient in these HMO and Insurance Company days of triumphalism and the fifteen-minute patient visit is to pull out a pad and write a prescription for...something. And antibiotics are harmless...aren't they?

I am sure that many people have had the experience of being violently ill at both ends after having been prescribed an antibiotic. They are not "harmless". They kill off all the good germs as well as the bad, such as the ones in your intestines, the ones which digest your food and protect you from the germs that may be in it. These are known as "intestinal flora"

Now, antibiotics are a wonderful thing, certainly. Back in the pre-antibiotic times young and healthy people with their whole lives in front of them died regularly from stupid things like stepping on a dirty nail, or pneumonia, or peritonitis. Both Houdini and Valentino died from peritonitis, which almost seems unbelievable today. Imagine Lance Burton and Jude Law dying like that nowadays.

However, overuse and abuse of antibiotics has caused the pendulum to swing, and to swing quite violently. More and more antibiotics have become quite useless, as the bacterium have evolved in ways to outwit them. Especially dangerous is the common practice of taking a course of antibiotics not for the prescribed ten days but until one "felt better" which means that the strongest germs survive, to infect again another day.

Now the genie is out of the bottle, with the news that 19,000 people died of MRSA in 2005. This information was released on Wednesday and stuns experts. More people died in 2005 from MRSA than died from HIV-AIDS, Parkinson's. Emphysema or homicide in that year.

By extrapolating data collected in nine places, the researchers estimated that 94,360 developed an invasive infection from MRSA in 2005 and that nearly one out of every five, or 18,650 of them died. Of course there was the usual hand-wringing about hand-washing. Yes, hand washing in a hospital setting is a very positive thing and we have all seen the movies where the doctors "scrub up" before performing the delicate and life saving operations. I remember learning as a child about puerperal fever, and how the doctors would move between one woman and another in the charity wards in Vienna delivering babies without so much as wiping their hands off. Of course the women died like flies and soon the women began to beg to be admitted to the wards where the interns, who were cleaner, were trained.

Cleanliness is all very well, and I have never seen a doctor not wash his hands before examining me. The explosion of MRSA is due to one thing and one thing alone: Overuse of antibiotics. Antibiotics are for people who have a dangerous and life threatening infection in their body. They are not for people with colds or sore throats. Antibiotics do not treat viruses. At. All. If you have a virus you either live or die, and that is about the size of it. Three years ago my husband and I both had Hepatitis A, which we caught at the Worcester Alaskan King Crab Festival. I was asked constantly by well wishers if I had been to the doctor and what antibiotics I was taking. Well, I didn't bother to go to the doctor-for what? So he could tell me I had Hepatitis A? I already knew this. And what would an antibiotic do for Hepatitis A, which is a VIRUS? There is no treatment for Hepatitis A except for bed rest and eating starchy foods.You either live or die-that's it. We both had jaundice and lived on potatoes and coffee cake for six weeks and are here to tell the tale. No antibiotics involved. And do people die from Hep A? Sure. In people over forty ten in one hundred die.

The American people, and people in the world in general, have got to get over their love affair with antibiotics. Antibiotics are great things in their way, which is fighting massive bacterial infections in the body. They are not any substitute for a healthy lifestyle or good doctoring. They are not for "I don't feel good" I also want to get on my high horse here and state that if a course of antibiotics becomes necessary for any reason it should immediately be followed up with a course of acidophilus, which can be purchased at a local health food store. This will replace the intestinal flora that the antibiotic killed off as it killed off the infection and help to preserve you from such nasty things as thrush and candida infections.

Of course what this whole sorry state of affairs shows is the pathetic state of American health care as a whole. We need to get rid of these bloodsucking HMO'S and insurance companies and go down one of either two paths:

1. Completely for profit medicine. Everytime I have had a for-profit procedure done, like Restalyne injections or laser treatments I have been perfectly happy. I am in control, the procedure is done at my convenience and the results are good. Also, the price is reasonable because the market sets it.

2. Single-payer medicine which is granted as a right from the government, sort of like having police or fire departments or having the roads paved. At least this will stop the record number of people going bankrupt on account of illness. However it might beggar the rest of us.

Either one of these two alternatives would put to an end your-fifteen-minutes-are-up-let-me-pull-out-my-prescription-pad-and -prescribe-amoxicillin, which is the way that medicine is practiced in the US right now. The first for-profit-model would, because the patients would never return and the doctor would do rotten business, and the second socialized concept would too because no doctor of his own free will would ever see a patient every fifteen minutes.

Either way, there needs to be a change and soon, before MRSA becomes a tearing epidemic, which seems entirely possible. 

How well I remember the Louise Woodward case. Dear Louise-every day that that trial continued was sort of like a gift from heaven. The brilliant cross examination of the medical experts by Martha Coakley, the way that on some days the evidence in the trial swung towards innocence, and on other days towards guilt-although there was never any doubt in my mind of the guilt of the accused. It was just a classic. While I would not hang a dog on medical evidence, neither would I cut down a dog which, to pardon the expression, was so well and truly hung.

For those with short memories, Louise Woodward was a British au pair who either beat an eight-month child in her care named Matthew Eappen to death or (to be fair) shook him to death after dropping him and cracking his skull open. So convinced were she and her expensive legal team that she would get off that at her specific request only the possibility of a second degree murder verdict was allowed to go back to the jury. As a general rule, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts there are what are called "lesser included charges" which could include anything from assault with a deadly weapon to jaywalking to manslaughter. This means that the jury, if they are so inclined, can "split the baby" if they feel that the top charge was not proved but the accused person did SOMETHING.

I will never forget until my dying day the brilliant closing statement by Gerard T. Leone, the assistant District Attorney. During the trial itself all the cross and direct examination were handled, and brilliantly, by Martha Coakley, Leone's assistant. Leone just sat at the table, his hair growing longer and more shaggy by the day. I said to myself, who is this loser, and why do they even bother to have him in the courtroom? He is useless. Now, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is not the banana republic that British people said it was at the time of the Woodward trial. In point of fact our law is based directly on British Common Law. You would never have known this to hear some British people talk. They seemed not to recognize British Common Law when they saw it. In Massachusetts, unlike places like Texas and Mississippi, the defense speaks to the jury first and then the prosecution speaks to them, unless the defense has called no witnesses, in which case it has the right to be heard last. In the heretofore mentioned states the prosecution speaks to the jury both before and after the defense, which I have always found to be so unfair. In this particular case the defense called plenty of witnesses, and so consequently Leone spoke last to the jury. I make a particular point of this to silence my British critics, who seem not to realize that this is what they do at the Old Bailey too.

Leone rose, he spoke, and when he had finished everyone in the courtroom was in tears, including this correspondent. Louise Woodward sat at the defense table exposed completely for what she was - a nasty little liar and murderess who had killed a child in a fit of rage and had not the smallest shred of remorse for it. When the jury came back with the only verdict they were allowed by law to give, second-degree murder, she wept and wailed, "How can I go to prison when I'm only nineteen!" Fortunately for Louise her judge was a senile old fool and he threw the juries' verdict out, replacing it with manslaughter and a sentence of time served. Although I feel manslaughter was in fact the proper verdict I shall never forget the arrogance of Louise Woodward standing at the defense table with her loathsome lawyer, Barry Scheck, demanding a verdict of second degree murder or nothing. I shall never forget Gerard T. Leone sitting with his hair hanging over his eyes, when asked if Louise's tears upset him. He replied, swinging his head back and forth like a wounded animal, "All I could hear was baby Matty crying"

The whole rest of the sordid story is all too well known, including the way Louise's parents raided the defense funds donated to in good faith by naive idiots to buy fancy clothes and jewelry. I have never seen a better example of the well worn saying "The apple does not fall too far from the tree"

Now here we are in 2007 and we have Kate McCann, or as I like to think of her, "Louise II". The latest statement by her really is beyond belief. "If I weighed another two stone, had a bigger bosom and looked more maternal, people would be more sympathetic" This is right up there with Louise's  statement that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts should have provided her with a top flight hairdresser to prepare her for her court appearances. Oh, really? What barbarians we are! Almost as bad as the Portuguese, who gave the McCanns a computer that wasn't the latest model. Consequently it was useless. Have you ever heard better definitions of the term "Narcissistic Personality Disorder"? For those not up on this term, a brief description follows.

A person with NPD has:

1.a grandiose sense of self importance

2.is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

3.believes that she is special and unique and can only be understood by other special people

4.strong sense of entitlement

5.takes advantage of others to achieve her own ends

6.lacks empathy

7.arrogant behavior

This couldn't be Kate McCann, could it? Her daughter is dead-I believe through drugs administered by her own hand- and all she can think of is her figure and how we are all supposedly admiring it. She is special- she killed her daughter but oh well- just one of those things. It just happened. She is a doctor. It's different when she kills. We should all understand. And those Portuguese police-what a set of meanies.

I still get messages about how the proof of Kate McCann's innocence is that she stayed in Portugal. Listen, people- is she there now? She stayed in Portugal until the body was disposed of and then she kept on, out of fear, to make sure the police had no line on where the body was concealed. As soon as the police threatened to put her in jail she fled. This is NOT the behavior of an innocent person. It is classic CRIMINAL behavior. It is based on FEAR. She hopes the British will not extradite her. From what I know of recent history she is probably quite right. I also get messages about the Tapas party and that it would have been impossible for Madeleine to have been killed during the Tapas party. Actually I quite agree- during the Tapas party Madeleine was already dead. The opened door and window and the agonized cry "They've taken her!" are what is known as staging.

Another thing I often hear is why the parents went through this elaborate hoax. If the death was an accident why not 'fess up and get it over with? Again somehow this is proof of innocence, supposedly. Well, who knows? If all the criminals in the world would just confess the world would be a better place, wouldn't it? Why don't you just ask the McCanns?