How Nasty Things Spread
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This interested me enormously. At the beginning of October I’d never heard of Clostridium difficile–or “C diff,” as nurses call it. But then my mother in Saint Louis contracted the infection–in a clean, cheery Lutheran convalescent home far from the squalor of socialized medicine–and died. My sister, who lives in Vancouver and isn’t an ardent foe of Canada’s health system, arrived in Saint Louis with a packet of information on C. difficile, including an alarming article on the Quebec outbreak published just that morning, October 22, in Canada’s National Post. Dr. John Marshall, a professor of surgery at the University of Toronto whose study of C. difficile was about to be released, told the Post that overuse of antibiotics was destroying the natural defenses elderly patients had against the infection. He predicted that his research could lead to what the Post called a “watershed change” in the use of antibiotics in intensive-care units. Nowhere in the article did Marshall or anyone else suggest that the rash of deadly C. difficile cases could be blamed on socialized medicine.
Moreover, a second article provided by my sister reported the claim of an infection-control specialist in Montreal that the “epidemic strain” of C. difficile plaguing his city had shown up earlier in the U.S. and probably originated there.
“That’s the most outrageous, raving poppycock I’ve ever heard,” said Marshall. “Infection-control procedures do play a role, but I’d wager there’s no significant difference between Canadian and U.S. hospitals. That is just so far over-the-top it’s almost not worthy of commentary. I have a sense this is a man whose thought processes are a little bit out of control.”
But, said Wycliff, “there’s another way to look at that record.” When the Tribune has opposed a Republican, either at the polls or in office, “the Tribune’s reputation as a ‘Republican newspaper’ gave extra potency to its counterintuitive action.” Perhaps “ontological essence” would have put the matter more exactly than “reputation,” but Wycliff’s point was not just clear but valid. The editorial page exists to make the Republican argument.
The endorsement itself was properly hard on Kerry and improperly easy on Bush. It began by speaking of “new force vectors” that “drive our decision-making,” thereby losing all but the hardiest readers, and went on to hail the “privilege of choosing between two major-party candidates whose integrity, intentions and abilities are exemplary.” Perhaps the Tribune was merely trying to be generous here, but the effect of this outlandish passage was to promise an editorial discussion lightly rooted in the real world.
Here’s something for Mark Steyn to consider the next time he stops doing cartwheels for the American health system long enough to wipe his brow. During my stay in Saint Louis I had to ask a local pharmacy to refill a prescription. It’s a common drug that costs me $30 a month, but because I’d left my drug-plan card at home, I asked what the full retail cost was. Slightly over $300.
