Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Underlying Conditions



It's happened again. 

While stumbling through the bleary eyed morning routine of coffee, feeding the dogs, and checking email, I hear the empty headed, blonde news babe on Channel 3 chirp that there has been another death in Maricopa County linked to the West Nile virus.  But, she babbles to her equally vacuous anchorette, the patient had underlying conditions that contributed to his demise, so there clearly is nothing to worry about.  Just use a little Off, and no green pools!  And now to sports.

I want to puke.

There really is no other way to say it.  Yeah, I know, more people die from car wrecks and bad food than from West Nile.  And you know, those underlying conditions.  If those poor slobs didn't have those underlying conditions, well now, they'd just be fine and dandy.  West Nile had nothing to do with it.  Nothing to worry about.  No panic.  Be calm, little sheep.

That is such a fail.  Yes, some people get West Nile and have nothing more than an influenza.  More people are infected and their lives are completely shattered by the devastation of the illness and the length of the recovery; and many are not able to return to work.  And some, fine one day, are bitten by a mosquito, and within a few hours are critically ill and eventually die, either from the disease roaring through an inflamed brain, or from other infections that invade the burned over wreckage that has become their body.  Like my husband.  With all his underlying conditions.

I am sure that the "underlying conditions" qualifier is to keep the public from panicking.  But the truth is West Nile virus is a killer, just like AIDS, smallpox, Ebola or any other flavor of death dealing infection.  Call the murderer by its true name:  Pestilence.  Disease.

West Nile virus is a disease.  And the dead were killed by West Nile, not by their "underlying conditions".  No amount of Health Department spin is going to change that.

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