Tradewinds Flashback Warren Green July 2014

Your healthy immune system usually recognizes when something is amiss. In my May article ( See www.albemarletradewinds.com.) I talked about antibiotics in the food chain and how it compromises your immune system.

Connecting the dots. The government allowable contamination standard for raw poultry is 25% or less. That’s 1 in 4 birds. What with chicken parts and cross-contamination, well, you do the math. There isn’t a “no zero tolerance policy”, and the USDA doesn’t have recall authority. So, if a packer or processor exceeds the standard, you probably won’t know until it’s consumed. That means your immune system is always working, and poultry is probably a better option than red meat, or shellfish.
Knowing what we know about how the immune system is trained by the bacteria in the gut, and how antibiotics indiscriminately kills bacteria, some of whose job is to protect you from carcinogenics and anything else that might be underlying like shingles (measles virus), its easy to reason that what you consume might be killing the trainers.
We now have the phenomena of antibiotic resistance as a result of antibiotic overuse. What do you do if an exotic organism such as MERS enters the country? What does the Healthcare/Medical community have in its arsenal to address a potential epidemic/pandemic if antibiotics are not effective?

Now a little politics. I am a retired federal bureaucrat, and a free market advocate. In the aforementioned I described how government policy, by not requiring identification of antibiotics in our food, is complicit in the harm that’s being done to the consuming public. Consequently, if government policy is making you ill, its criminal to make you pay to get well. Fifty percent of the healthcare in the United States is single payer (Medicare,Medicaid, Tricare, and C.H.I.P.S.) and rising. The other 50% is a bureaucratic nightmare, authored by special interest. Consider this, the IRS will be scrutinizing anyone who’s healthcare has been subsidized by the ACA/Obamacare. How can that dual system possibly be managed? Just saying.

Finally, a shout out to the Diagnostic Imaging Department of Sentara Albemarle Medical Center.
As a cancer survivor and advocate, I frequent a lot of facilities for various services and treatment. I was very impressed with their professionalism and courtesy.