From the Careful What You Wish For Files: NHS dentistry shake-up fails as one million fewer get treatment

I heard on Dennis Prager today a call from a British man who pointed out that, in the 10 years of Tony Blair’s socialism, every major institution in Britain declined. And the more the government meddled, the greater the decline. Today’s British papers offer yet another example: The dental portion of the National Health Service was in trouble, so the government, rather than releasing market forces, interfered even more than before (which is hard to imagine, but nevertheless true). This is the horrible result of maximum government meddling in what should be a thriving supply and demand marketplace for dental care:

The shake-up of NHS dentistry has been a disaster with standards of care dropping and almost one million fewer people being treated on the health service under the new system, a damning report by MPs has found.

Dentists now have no financial incentive to treat complex cases and patients are being pushed unnecessarily into the hospital system

Instead of improving access to NHS dentistry the reforms have made it worse, the report by the House of Commons Health Select Committee found.

The number of dentists working in the health service has fallen, the number of NHS treatments carried out has dropped and in many areas patients are still experiencing severe difficulties in finding a dentist to treat them.

Worryingly, complex treatments carried out on the NHS have dropped by half while both referrals to hospital and tooth extractions have increased.

This suggests dentists are simply removing teeth rather than taking on complicated treatments because they have become uneconomical to provide.

The report said that in the two years following the introduction of the new contract in April 2006, 900,000 fewer people saw an NHS dentist than in the last two years of the previous system. Even this could be an underestimate, it said.

Ministers introduced the reforms to the dental contract despite widespread concern they would not improve access to care. The contract was so unpopular that more than one in ten dentists refused to sign it and more than a third signed it in dispute.

However, the then health minister in charge of dentistry Rosie Winterton insisted: “The reforms will improve access, encourage more preventive dentistry and provide a stable income for dentists.”

You can read the rest here. It’s depressing reading and should be read with a part of your brain holding on to the fact that Barack Obama wants to put the American government bureaucracy in charge of your medical and dental care too.

The Left’s faith in government control is truly impressive when one considers that, with amazing consistency, after a brief bump from the infusion of vast amounts of taxpayer cash (or, in the case of Europe, American funding), the systems inevitably collapse under the weight of a government ineptitude, inflexibility, and corruption.

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We all know the story of penicillin’s discovery: it arose from a lab accident when Alexander Fleming noticed that an accidental mold was killing bacteria. That coincidental discovery changed the modern world. It looks as if we can be seeing another pencillin moment, with an accidental fungus leading the way in the fight against cancer (emphasis mine):

A drug developed using nanotechnology and a fungus that contaminated a lab experiment may be broadly effective against a range of cancers, U.S. researchers reported on Sunday.

The drug, called lodamin, was improved in one of the last experiments overseen by Dr. Judah Folkman, a cancer researcher who died in January. Folkman pioneered the idea of angiogenesis therapy — starving tumors by preventing them from growing blood supplies.

Lodamin is an angiogenesis inhibitor that Folkman’s team has been working to perfect for 20 years. Writing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, his colleagues say they developed a formulation that works as a pill, without side-effects.

They have licensed it to SynDevRx, Inc, a privately held Cambridge, Massachusetts biotechnology company that has recruited several prominent cancer experts to its board.

Tests in mice showed it worked against a range of tumors, including breast cancer, neuroblastoma, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer, brain tumors known as glioblastomas and uterine tumors.

It helped stop so-called primary tumors and also prevented their spread, Ofra Benny of Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School and colleagues reported.

“Using the oral route of administration, it first reaches the liver, making it especially efficient in preventing the development of liver metastasis in mice,” they wrote in their report. “Liver metastasis is very common in many tumor types and is often associated with a poor prognosis and survival rate,” they added.

Read more here.

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Many years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who was a medical student on his neurology rotation. He related what was, to me, an amazing story. The patient he saw that day was a fairly young man who had suffered a major stroke, resulting in an almost complete loss of speech (aphasia). He could still form sentences, but the words were all wrong. So, instead of saying “Can I have a drink of water,” he’d say “Cow book the drive blanket for tears.” It was tragic. What struck my friend, though, was when the doctor in charge asked the patient to sing “Twinkle, twinkle.” My friend expected to hear nothing, or gibberish. Instead, the patient sang the song word perfectly — and was able to do so with several other nursery songs. That’s when I first learned that we store music, including lyrics, in a different part of our brain from language.

Because of my friend’s anecdote, I’ve always been fascinated by the intersection between words and lyrics. I therefore read with interest a story in today’s New York Times about a singing therapy for aphasic stroke victims:

The technique, called melodic intonation therapy, was developed in 1973 by Dr. Martin Albert and colleagues at the Boston Veterans Affairs Hospital. The aim was to help patients with damage to Broca’s area — the speaking center of the brain, located in its left hemisphere.

These patients still had relatively healthy right hemispheres. And while the left hemisphere is largely responsible for speaking, the right hemisphere is used in understanding language, as well as processing melodies and rhythms.

“You ask yourself, ‘What specifically engages the right hemisphere?’ ” said Dr. Gottfried Schlaug, a neurologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who studies music’s effect on the brain.

Melodic intonation therapy seems to engage the right hemisphere by asking patients to tap out rhythms and repeat simple melodies. Therapists first work with patients to create sing-song sentences that can be set to familiar tunes, then work on removing the melody to leave behind a more normal speaking pattern.

But relatively little research has been done to understand how this type of therapy affects the brain of a stroke patient.

In a study completed in 2006, Dr. Schlaug and colleagues at Harvard tracked the progress of eight patients with Broca’s aphasia as they underwent 75 sessions of melodic intonation therapy. M.R.I. scans taken when the patients were speaking simple words and phrases showed that activity in the right hemisphere had changed significantly over the course of treatment.

“The combination of melodic intonation and hand-tapping activates a system of the right side of the brain that is always there, but is not typically used for speech,” Dr. Schlaug said.

He recommends melodic intonation therapy for patients who have no meaningful form of speech, but can understand language and have the patience for therapy sessions.

You can read the rest of the story here, including an interview with a stroke victim who re-learned speech through this technique.

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One of the things the feminists insist upon is absolute equality, whether that means depriving men of the opportunity to participate in college sports simply because there aren’t enough women to create parity, something that’s now being done in the sciences as well; or allowing women to engage in sexual activity as if they were men. I’ve commented on that last point before in the context of the new type of rape claim, which has women getting themselves completely incapacitated through drugs or alcohol, falling into bed with a stranger and then later, when regret hits, crying rape (Laer calls this “gray rape”).

The fact is that, no matter what the feminists insist should be reality, when it comes to sex, women operate at a handicap level men don’t: historically, they were the ones who got pregnant. In modern times, we’ve been able to control that outcome, whether through birth control or abortions — both of which can be inconvenient, unpleasant or downright dangerous. Even removing or diminishing the inevitability of pregnancy though, doesn’t do away with the hits nature imposes against women who step out too often sexually. It is women who suffer disproportionately from sexually transmitted diseases. As the African experience shows, when it comes to heterosexual sex, women are more vulnerable to HIV. Even without that scourge, women suffer more from sexually transmitted diseases: for men, chlamydia is a nothing; for women, it can create infertility, lead to greater vulnerability to HIV and, in pregnant women, put the child at risk. Likewise, for men, HPV (human papillomavirus) is an unsavory inconvenience; for women, it can be the trigger for cervical cancer.

Given the risks sex has for women — pregnancy, dangerous or emotionally devastating abortions, death in childbirth (a rather old-fashioned risk, but still a risk), HIV, infertility, and cancer — monogamous sex within a stable marriage is a great societal gift to women. I’m not talking, of course, about a situation in which the woman is expected to be monogamous, while her partner gets to do an Eliot Spitzer. That’s a dreadful situation, and Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen), whose husband infected her with syphilis, is the perfect example of the horrors of a one-sided demand for monogamy. Rather, I’m talking about the idealized relationship that sees a man and a woman meet, fall in love, get married and only then begin to have sex — with each other, and with no one else. It’s even okay if they meet, fall in love, have sex with each other only, get married, and continue to have sex with each other only. In our sex saturated society, where there’s always the promise of a new bedmate, this may sound a little dull, but it has its create compensations, for men and women both. Sexually variety is lessoned (which is, I think, a great hit to the men), but safety, affection, stability, and ease of access are all greatly increased. Even if it’s not always achievable, it should certainly be our goal.

The flip side of this idealized and increasingly arcane view of sexual relations is the new morality that tells girls that, if boys can sleep around, girls should be able to do so too. In the guise of equality, we’ve told our innocent young girls, girls who know only the world we offer them, that it’s just fine for them to “hook up” with a strange guy, have sex with multiple people, and basically to treat their health bodies as drive-throughs for men. Boys, of course, being nobody’s fools, willingly participate in this emotionally sterile culture.

If you’re curious about this degraded culture — one that is now the norm for American teenage girls and young women, and of course for the boys with whom they have sex — there are three excellent books on the subject. The first is Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, which describes the raunch culture in which our young girls (and boys) are encouraged to live; the second is Carol Platt Liebau’s book Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls, the title of which is self-explanatory; and the third is Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel, a novel describing a young college woman’s experiences in this nihilistic sexual jungle.

The problem for all the feminists, and the men who recognize a good thing when they see it (no strings sex), is that nature will bite back. And so today, we read that 1 in 4 teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease, with chlamydia and HPV topping the list. These diseases disproportionately affect African-American teens.

I’m willing to bet that, in the next few days, there will be articles about how this is Bush’s fault because he’s cut back on sex education. The fact that it’s African-American girls who bear the brunt of this epidemic means people will cite the usual culprits of racism and poverty, with the crackpots invariably claiming a Jewish plot. People will write that we need to improve birth control, that we need to improve sex education, that we need to improve screening for diseases, that we need to cut down on racism, that we need to spend government funds to fight poverty amongst African-Americans, and that we need to take the embarrassment factor out of sex so that teens will learn about birth control, disease prevention and disease treatment. (This last idea will, of course, be the most stupid, because it is the nature of ones teen years to live in an agony of embarrassment about everything. You can’t remove embarrassment, since it is the dominant underlying teen condition.)

The one thing no one will suggest, whether they’re coming from the MSM, the government, the liberal blogosphere, Hollywood, or anywhere else that has a loud voice across America, is that we start changing the culture, both among white and black teenagers. No one will suggest that movies and TV shows begin to do what was done in before the sexual revolution, which is to send out to teenagers the message that sex is for marriage and adults. Nothing in any medium will start to say that girls and boys should treat their bodies as something precious; that the sexual urge, although strong, can be controlled; and that there should be room in male/female relationships for love, affection and respect, all of which get pushed aside in the headlong rush for the bedroom. All that will happen is a shrill demand for more money to facilitate more teen sex — more sex education classes; more condoms that won’t get used; more clever advertisements about STDs, advertisements that teens will assiduously ignore; and ever more strident demands from the feminists and their opportunistic male fellow travelers that girls should approach sex in the same cavalier way that boys have been encouraged to view it.

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Update: The man who was staying in the room where the Ricin was found is hospitalized and in a coma. Police claim that they don’t believe that this incident is terrorist related. However, I’m a bit confused; the man who reported the Ricin is unidentified and wasn’t a guest of the motel. Can we conclude that the unidentified man has ties to the comatose man? The whole story seems to still be developing and is quite strange to say the least.

The toxin Ricin was found at a Las Vegas extended stay motel. Ricin is derived from castor beans and is so toxic that the amount of a pinhead can kill an adult person. The toxin gets inside the cells of the body and prevents the cells from making vital protein.

Reportedly an unidentified man, who was not a guest of the motel, brought it to the attention of motel workers:

The substance was brought to the attention of employees at Extended StayAmerica, 4270 S. Valley View Blvd., at approximately 2:30 p.m. by an unidentified man who gained access to one of the motel rooms, though he was not staying at the property, police said.

The motel employees thought that the substance looked suspicious and called authorities. The employees and others who came in contact with the toxin have been decontaminated and hospitalized for observation.

Officers on the scene said that the Ricin was in a small vile along with the actual castor beans.

Source: Las Vegas Sun

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Toronto, with its growing immigrant population, will likely see an increase of deadly, contagious tuberculosis, experts say. The current system simply couldn’t handle an outbreak, but the province has yet to make the changes required to protect citizens

Something to think about the nest time you are on a crowded subway, running under Chinatown or Little Somalia.

TB is not going to disappear from Toronto as long as we are an immigration centre. We need to plan for cases to continue to arrive here and to be able to deal with them at the highest level of care.

Yup, those ethnic restaurants were totally worth it. Right?

PS: It may also be worthwhile to remember that our immigrant darlings from Islamic countries are a bit needle-shy when it comes to vaccinations. But we must respect their faith, at all costs. To do otherwise would infringe on their human rights. Think about that when you are shipping your kid off to school with their kids.

Whether it’s Polio vaccines in their countries (and sometimes here, because we don’t enforce it), or the MMR vaccine in Britain, or countless other measures (including their own doctors and nurses having sub-standard levels of hygiene because female medical practitioners do not practice safe hand-washing), or the fact that countries like Somalia would rather spend money on warfare than on sanitation (expecting our evil, Infidel Christian charities to foot the bill for that), we are going to continue to have a problem with 19th century diseases resurfacing from 7th century countries.

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Chocolate is protein, right? It had better be:

Diets high in protein may be the best way to keep hunger in check, U.S. researchers said on Thursday in a study that offers insight into how diets work.

They found that protein does the best job at keeping a hunger hormone in check, while carbohydrates and fats may well deserve their current nasty reputation.

The study, which will appear in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, looked at the effectiveness of different nutrients at suppressing ghrelin, a hormone secreted by the stomach that stimulates appetite.

“Suppression of ghrelin is one of the ways that you lose your appetite as you begin to eat and become sated,” said Dr. David Cummings of the University of Washington in Seattle, who worked on the study.

The researchers gave 16 people three different beverages, each with varying levels of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. They took blood samples before the first beverage, then every 20 minutes for six hours afterward, measuring ghrelin levels in each sample.

“The interesting findings were that fats suppress ghrelin quite poorly,” Cummings said in a telephone interview. They fared the poorest overall.

“Proteins were the best suppressor of ghrelin in terms of the combination of the depth and duration of suppression,” he said. “That is truly satisfying because high proteins are essentially common to almost all of the popular diets.”

Sadly, having read the article, I somehow don’t think that it is. It’s going to be tuna and flavorless chicken breasts from now on….

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AIDS is a disease that does not distinguish between race, religion, sex, or national origin. Like all diseases, it is opportunistic, and thrives when behaviors provide perfect incubation and vector situations. The promiscuity that characterized gay sex in the late 1970s and 1980s was the perfect petri dish for the disease to transition from obscure illness to world epidemic. It was never a “gay disease” — ’cause diseases do not indulge in identity politics — nor was it a “punishment from God” — which implies an intelligence directing the disease towards people of a certain identity. It was simply a disease that benefited from behaviors most common to gay men. And once it got its start, of course, it was able to find other niches — drug users, hemophiliacs, prostitutes, etc.

This little AIDS lecture is not just about history. Sadly, it’s also about the present, since gay sexual practices again seem to be strengthening for release on the general population another disease that, while not deliberately selecting people based on their sexual identity, nevertheless thrives when opportunity presents:

A new variety of staph bacteria, highly resistant to antibiotics and possibly transmitted by sexual contact, is spreading among gay men in San Francisco, Boston, New York and Los Angeles, researchers reported Monday.

The study released online by the journal Annals of Internal Medicine found the highest concentrations of infection by the drug-resistant bug in and around San Francisco’s Castro district and among patients who visit health clinics that treat HIV infections in gay men in San Francisco and Boston.

The culprit is a form of MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a bug that was once confined to hospitalized patients but, since the late 1990s, has been circulating outside medical settings, afflicting anyone from injection-drug users to elementary school students. A strain called USA300 has been a leading cause of MRSA infection in this decade, and an exceptionally drug-resistant variant of it is now on the loose, researchers say.

The study estimated that 1 in 588 residents living within the Castro neighborhood 94114 ZIP code area is infected with that variant, which is resistant to six types of commonly used antibiotics. The risk of contracting this difficult-to-treat bug is 13 times greater for gay men than for the rest of the city’s population, researchers found.

“We probably had it here first, and now it is spreading elsewhere,” said Binh An Diep, a researcher at San Francisco General Hospital and lead author of the report. “This is a national problem, and San Francisco is at the epicenter.”

The germ typically causes boils and other skin and soft-tissue infections and, despite its resistance to some drugs, is still treatable by surgical drainage and several classes of antibiotics. What is unusual in this case is the high percentage of infections - up to 40 percent - occurring in the buttocks and genitalia.

Although researchers have stopped short of declaring this form of staph a sexually transmitted disease, the infections are found where skin-to-skin contact occurs during sexual activity.

I would urge gay men to remember the hard-learned lessons of the AIDS era. Then, flush with their new political identity, they rebuffed any attacks to restrain their sexual practices on the ground that those efforts were homophobic and that the only thing to be done was for the government to throw money at the disease in the hopes of a quick remedy. Sadly, AIDS was resistant to any quick remedies and the time wasted on those political battles — even as epic sexual practices flourished unchecked — meant the difference between a possibly controllable endemic disease and a worldwide epidemic disease. It also meant the deaths of tens of thousands of gay men because, politics notwithstanding, in America they were always the most likely to be the disease’s victims.

With that history in mind, the first thing for gay men to do now is to resurrect the safe sex practices that they put into place when they realized the government couldn’t save them, practices that seem to have fallen by the wayside as the AIDS specter retreated before useful, life-prolonging symptomatic treatments. Otherwise, we may find that an endemic disease that could have been fairly easily squashed will become an epidemic disease that places us back in the bad old days before antibiotics. And if you need a reminder of what those bad old days were, remember that the British poet Rupert Brookes died during WWI, not from a war injury, but from an infected mosquito bite.

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One of the most striking things about the Jewish Bible is the respect it demands for dead bodies. As a result, Jewish ritual holds that the dead cannot be mutilated in any way and must be interred as quickly as possible — preferably within 24 hours of death. Desecration is anathema to the Jews. Many people ascribe this respect to the Jewish belief in resurrection. Others though, believe that there is one other element to the requirement that bodies be treated with respect, which is the fact that the Jewish religion arose during pagan times — and pagans were deeply committed to body mutilation.

In pagan cultures, which had no separation between “church” and state, the religious leaders would routinely sacrifice people to the Gods and then, before or as part of the death process, the victims’ brains and internal organs would be ripped out by the priests for study and ritual cremation for the gods. (The story of Isaac is, as everyone knows, the definitive Biblical statement against human sacrifice.) Even if people weren’t deliberately sacrificed, but died for other reasons, the state priests could still desecrate the corpses for religious purposes. The instant burial required under Jewish law was almost certainly an effort to protect bodies from assault by pagan priests. To this day, religious Jews will not allow themselves to be cremated.

I was thinking of the pagan state’s interest ripping out the deads’ internal organs when I read this, out of England:

Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to allow hospitals to take organs from dead patients without explicit consent.

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, the Prime Minister says that such a facility would save thousands of lives and that he hopes such a system can start this year.

The proposals would mean consent for organ donation after death would be automatically presumed, unless individuals had opted out of the national register or family members objected.

Pragmatically speaking, Brown is right — a lot of perfectly good human organs go to waste when they could be put to use in the living. Nevertheless, there is something creepy and frightening about the state harvesting dead bodies, and it made me think of Jews in pagan times. On the one hand, you had the Jews with their tremendous respect for humanity, and their rules aimed at elevating the human condition and, on the other hand, you had the pagans who viewed the body as something that could be folded, spindled and mutilated depending on how the priests interpreted the whims of the Gods.

The other reason to get worried about this proposal is the “soylent green” nature of it. Once the government gets into the business of harvesting body parts — especially if it’s the same government that runs the health care system — you might want to go somewhere other than a state hospital if you’re at imminent risk of death. Once in the hospital, you may discover to your cost that it’s cheaper for the government to let you die so that it can use your organs for someone who might subsequently be less of a burden on the health care system than you are. Indeed, the plan seems to be set up precisely to achieve that cost effective goal:

But patients’ groups said that they were “totally opposed” to Mr Brown’s plan, saying that it would take away patients’ rights over their own bodies.

There are more than 8,000 patients waiting for an organ donation and more than 1,000 a year die without receiving the organ that could save their lives.

The Government will launch an overhaul of the system next week, which will put pressure on doctors and nurses to identify more “potential organ donors” from dying patients. Hospitals will be rated for the number of deceased patients they “convert” into donors and doctors will be expected to identify potential donors earlier and alert donor co-ordinators as patients approach death. [The emphasis is mine because, if this isn’t scarily Orwellian, I truly don’t know what is.]

Organ donation can be a great gift and I honor those who decide to make it a part of their death. Nevertheless, I cannot conceive of a situation in which it should be anything but voluntary. Having the same government that provides medical treatment make the decision is the stuff of the worst kind of Utopian totalitarianism.

UPDATE: The above story was from the right leaning Telegraph, which presents the plan as something upsetting (something with which I agree). Here’s how the left leaning Guardian presents the same story, with the focus on the needy transplant recipients, not on the state’s increasing control over life, death and after death:

A revolution in the way organs are donated for transplant is called for today by the government’s chief medical officer as concern grows over the acute shortage of donors and the rise in unnecessary deaths.

An expert report to be published this week says that every major hospital in Britain must have an organ donor specialist skilled in persuading grieving families that the hearts, lungs, kidneys and other vital organs of their deceased relatives should be used to save the lives of others.

Sir Liam Donaldson, England’s chief medical officer, will back the findings of the government’s taskforce on organ donation, but wants to go further and introduce a new system of donation because the shortage of organs is so severe. Three people a day are dying while on the waiting list for a transplant as the demand for a new organ is rapidly outstripping their supply.

Donaldson is advocating a system of ‘presumed consent’, where everyone in Britain would be presumed to be a donor unless they had specifically opted out, or unless their families had objections.

‘We have one of the lowest rates [of organ donation] in Europe, far lower than Spain,’ he told The Observer. ‘We have one thousand or more patients dying on the waiting list each year, and there is a lot of suppressed demand, with doctors not even referring patients on to the list because there is no hope for them. That is a lot of patients dying.

‘I think at the moment people often don’t know whether their relative would have wanted to be a donor. Families are being approached when they are in a very distressed condition and, faced with uncertainty, their default position is to refuse consent. Often the quality of their dealing with clinical staff is not as good as it should be - the dialogue could be better. It does require considerable skill to handle such sensitive situations.’

Today we reveal the heartbreak of those who are waiting for organs and the uplifting stories of families who have consented to donate, and launch a campaign for the UK to move to the new system of presumed consent so that hundreds more lives can be saved.

As for me, having read that, I still find too Orwellian the thought of the government, in all its bureaucratic splendor, deciding who lives and who dies, and desecrating the dead in between those two extremes.

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Yesterday, I read that the British health care and ambulance services had been devastated by New Year’s drunkenness, a self-inflicted illness for which I, as a tee-totaller, have little sympathy. If you vomit because you got blitzed, serves you right.

Today, however, I read something that caused me to feel serious sympathy for the beleaguered, vomiting Brits. Apparently norovirus has hit England’s shores in a big way:

Calls to NHS Direct soared over the extended Christmas break as hundreds of thousands of people fell ill with a violent stomach bug.

More than 1.2m people logged on to the NHS Direct website or called for advice over the 11-day period, more than two thirds higher than the same time last year. Dental pain was the most common complaint followed by vomiting and abdominal pain.

The NHS advises patients affected to stay at home for 48 hours after they last suffered the symptoms

The figures confirm warnings from doctors and Government scientists that cases of the winter vomiting bug, called norovirus, have reached the highest level for five years.

Almost two million people are thought to have suffered with the two-day vomiting and diarrhoea bug between the beginning of September and the first week in December.

New cases will peak in the next month and doctors warned up to 200,000 a week could fall ill as schools and offices return after the Christmas break.

A staggering 1,122,874 people contacted NHS Direct during the extended 11-day Christmas and New Year break.

As someone who used to be vulnerable to stomach flu; who suffered from severe morning sickness 24/7 for the entirety of both her pregnancies; and who has been hospitalized twice with severe food poisoning, there are few things that elicit more sympathy from me then stomach flu. I wish the Brits the best of luck in combating this problem. I’m also keeping my fingers crossed that the norovirus, which always crops up here occasionally, doesn’t become epidemic.

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