Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Children Given A Death Sentence By Morality
There is really bad news for anyone who cares about the health of adolescents today, there is a jump in the number of new infections with Hepatitis C in injection drug uses as young as 13. The increase, even if it is due in part to better reporting is alarming.
BOSTON— The number of hepatitis C infections among teenagers and young adults in Massachusetts has risen dramatically in the past few years at a time when the abuse of intravenous drugs has also been on the rise, health officials say.
Confirmed and suspected cases of the blood-borne liver disease among people ages 15 to 25 climbed from 254 in 2001 to at least 784 in 2005, according to the state Department of Public Health.
The increase may be at least partially attributable to more diligent reporting of the disease by doctors.
"I suspect there is a direct correlation between the increase in hepatitis C among younger people and the increase in injection drug use and heroin use, in particular," said Public Health Commissioner John Auerbach. "It is terribly tragic, but it is very consistent with the pattern of risk that goes along with injection drug use."
I’ve got a personal interest in this one. About twenty years ago my father contracted liver cancer. A month before he died testing showed that he had a chronic case of Hepatitis C. In the short time there was to discover how he had contracted a disease then little known, it was concluded that he must have gotten it from a transfusion he was given at at a battle field hospital during the Second World War. The effects of the disease lay dormant for about forty years before manifesting itself in liver cancer. It wasn’t an easy, quick and painless way to go. No one who watched someone die that way could read about the rise in cases and not know that for some of those children, the price of their folly will be a death sentence and a means of execution as gruesome as any ever devised by the twisted mind of the medieval inquisitors. Some of those who contract the disease don't have to wait that long to die, very unpleasantly.
When will the moralists of the drug industry be over-ridden, their long, long history of unrealistic, ineffective crusade give way to reality? How many people will have to die before the simplest, effective means of preventing untold pain and death overtake the prissiness masking the highly lucrative money-making “morality” machine. Their cure for the disease of drug addiction has proven over decades of failure, billions of dollars of cost and countless lives to be snake oil and the effects are worse than the disease.
There is really bad news for anyone who cares about the health of adolescents today, there is a jump in the number of new infections with Hepatitis C in injection drug uses as young as 13. The increase, even if it is due in part to better reporting is alarming.
BOSTON— The number of hepatitis C infections among teenagers and young adults in Massachusetts has risen dramatically in the past few years at a time when the abuse of intravenous drugs has also been on the rise, health officials say.
Confirmed and suspected cases of the blood-borne liver disease among people ages 15 to 25 climbed from 254 in 2001 to at least 784 in 2005, according to the state Department of Public Health.
The increase may be at least partially attributable to more diligent reporting of the disease by doctors.
"I suspect there is a direct correlation between the increase in hepatitis C among younger people and the increase in injection drug use and heroin use, in particular," said Public Health Commissioner John Auerbach. "It is terribly tragic, but it is very consistent with the pattern of risk that goes along with injection drug use."
I’ve got a personal interest in this one. About twenty years ago my father contracted liver cancer. A month before he died testing showed that he had a chronic case of Hepatitis C. In the short time there was to discover how he had contracted a disease then little known, it was concluded that he must have gotten it from a transfusion he was given at at a battle field hospital during the Second World War. The effects of the disease lay dormant for about forty years before manifesting itself in liver cancer. It wasn’t an easy, quick and painless way to go. No one who watched someone die that way could read about the rise in cases and not know that for some of those children, the price of their folly will be a death sentence and a means of execution as gruesome as any ever devised by the twisted mind of the medieval inquisitors. Some of those who contract the disease don't have to wait that long to die, very unpleasantly.
When will the moralists of the drug industry be over-ridden, their long, long history of unrealistic, ineffective crusade give way to reality? How many people will have to die before the simplest, effective means of preventing untold pain and death overtake the prissiness masking the highly lucrative money-making “morality” machine. Their cure for the disease of drug addiction has proven over decades of failure, billions of dollars of cost and countless lives to be snake oil and the effects are worse than the disease.
