The Wages of Austerity: Superbug Runs Wild in Greek Hospitals

[Renew Deal]

Many writers tend to depict the effects of austerity in purely economic terms: loss of wealth and income, lesser income/social mobility. But depressions and accompanying changes in social norms can and do have more serious consequences.

A story in Bloomberg illustrates how the combination of budgets slashed thanks to austerity policies leads directly to deaths. The Wall Street Journal described last year how distress in the Greek economy had produced a significant increase in suicides. A new Bloomberg story recounts how severe cutbacks in hospital staffing have enabled superbugs that is hard to combat even under normal circumstances to inflict even more fatalities than usual in Greek hospitals. An ugly side to this problem is that overreliance on antibiotics in Greece created the conditions that helped these potent infectious agents to develop.

From Bloomberg:

Greek doctors are fighting a new invisible foe every day at their hospitals: a pneumonia-causing superbug that most existing antibiotics can’t kill.. The hospital-acquired germ killed as many as half of people with blood cancers infected at Laiko General Hospital, a 500-bed facility in central Athens.

The drug-resistant K. pneumoniae bacteria have a genetic mutation that allows them to evade such powerful drugs as AstraZeneca Plc’s Merrem and Johnson & Johnson’s Doribax. A 2010 survey found 49 percent of K. pneumoniae samples in Greece aren’t killed by the antibiotics of last resort, known as carbapenems, according to the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network. Many doctors have even tried colistin, a 50-year-old drug so potent that it can damage kidneys…

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/02/the-wages-of-austerity-superbug-runs-wild-in-greek-hospitals.html

[blue neen]

1. Frightening.

This is a scenario that the "drown government in a bathtub" aficianados would never consider.

[limpyhobbler]

2. We ought to be investing alot more in research and a public health infrastructure so that we will be

ready to face these challenges as they arise. This is an example of a problem that only coordinated government action can address.

[truedelphi]

3. We also live in a nation where quite inadequate actions by

Homeland Security cost us trillions of dollars. Yet the $ 21 a piece worth of doxycycline that should be on hand for each and every American, in terms of an anthrax attack, is still not available. And probably never will be.

Whoever is signing off on these thngs thinks it is far better to equip the airports with super-expensive scanning machinery that is emitting dangerous levels of radiation. (At least, those emissions are dangerous according to the top person of the radiology department at Johns Hopkins.)

[sabrina 1]

4. Tragic, the corrupt, greedy, criminals who crashed the world's economy

and then got their puppets in governments to keep bailing them out, and handing the bill to the people who had nothing to do with it, are responsible for all of this. And they are still putting even more pressure on those people.

Greece has lost its sovereignty, its government caving to the IMF and World Bank's Austerity programs, instead of doing what Iceland did, arrest those responsible, and nationalize the banks and make the gamblers pay their own debts.

I'm so glad that Occupy Wall Street put an end to the language of the IMF we were hearing so much of. This is what 'sharing the sacrifice' looks like. They've turned first world countries into third world countries and still, not one of them has been held accountable.

[girl gone mad]

5. it did not have to be this way.

Such a shame. The neoliberals will hold to their plans until the bitter end. In the meantime Greeks face needless death and decay, young workers are leaving in droves, children are being torn from their mother's arms, the seeds of despair and hatred have been planted in the hearts of many good people.

[sabrina 1]

9. No, it didn't. And whenever I see anyone attempting to defend any of this, including

making excuses for why none of them have been accountable, it makes me truly angry. The only way it will change is for decent people everywhere to become part of a Global movement against these policies, and to stop the flow of money into elections everywhere.

Looking at Europe right now, it is as if an invading army marched through the continent, replaced its democratic governments with oligarchs from big Global Corporations and imposed punishing policies on the people enslaving them for generations to the IMF and World Bank.

Who needs an actual army when you can launch Economic WMDS and gain control of nations that way? It's a lot less expensive, you get cheap labor for your Global Corps making it nearly impossible for the people to fight back.

[napoleon_in_rags]

6. Funny how those costs move around.

They run out of supplies, the superbugs they breed won't just effect them.

[Starry Messenger]

7. k&r

[Zalatix]

8. And who doesn't think this was intentional? This is all about getting rid of the

"Useless eaters".

They've got a supervirus out there right now that can kill half the world's population. Think that's a wild conspiracy theory? Nope, it's right here in the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/science/debate-persists-on-deadly-flu-made-airborne.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2063326/Scientists-mutate-bird-flu-make-MORE-contagious--critics-claim-bioweapon-kept-secret.html

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/dutch-scientist-agrees-omit-details-killer-bird-flu/story?id=15204649#.TzUJTBJSQbU