All in all this is a very sad situation and I only wish the residents of the tornado ladened area the very best.

Stupid comment, Southern Democrat

Our troops returning wounded from Afghanistan have a similar problem. There's a fungus that just tears up wounds left and right, and fungal infections are a bitch to combat. That's why you see so many wounded losing more and more of their limbs to amputations; the fungus that's in the Afghan air hinders any real healing.

Wher the hell did you pull the improper care from? Your ass?

Wher the hell did you pull the improper care from? Your ass?

The article did say -

Among the tornado survivors, some wounds that were stitched up had to be reopened because they had not been adequately cleaned, Schmidt said.

However I'm sure the care was due to the terrible circumstances they found them selves in just following a terrible disaster. Blame should not be put on anyone for that.

Yeah at least they were treated. otherwise a story might have read something completely different

They weren't cleaned all the way because they didn't have antiseptic in the very beginning.

The funniest thing is that Jon Jones posted his reply to my post and got at least 7 people to click like. That means at least 7 people did not read the article fully, or have reading comprehention problems. I understand that it was emergency care in a bad situation, but the fact is the infection is caused by improperly cleaned wounds. Is that somehow a difficult fact to accept for some?

The fact is the fungal infection was caused by inadequate cleaning of the wounds. This happened because emergency care care was being administered under extradordinary circumstances. The fact that the wounds were inadequately cleaned and the reasons why they were inadequately cleaned are two separate concepts all together. In the wake of the tornado aftermath it is completely understandable as to why the wounds may not have been adequately prepared before closing. This whole discussion is just another example of the sad state of basic reading and logic skills in the US today.

No from having worked at Freeman Medical Center.

Tony, reading comprehension is not a highly developed skill for many, many Newsvine posters. I often have clearly explained a simple point on Newsvine as many as three times, in proper grammatical English with correct punctuation, and some people still couldn't digest what I was saying.

Some of course are being deliberately obtuse because the point you are making contradicts their pet ideas that they simply aren't willing to dismiss. The majority however, just don't seem to be able to comprehend what you are saying. I think this is just another example of the decay of modern education: Too many readers these days simply don't have the language skills to be able to quickly absorb ideas presented in written form.

I agree. Unfortunately here it is clear they jumped on the "improper care" portion of my post as if it implied a criticism to health care providers, and not a fact in this case. Notice the trend going with reading my post then reading his and clicking like simply because it inflames anger. People are swayed by the righeous type posts. Mob mentality at its best.

I also note none have come back to reply. Hehe

Tony, yep. Noticed that.

Here is your reply Tony, if your claim is basic reading comprehension like the folks who are agreeing with you. You would have never even come up with the concept of improper care if you would have said it was amazing they were able to treat at all. Therein lies the difference between folks that know the extraordianary effort it took just to care for these folks in that setting, and someone that just blows crap out their ass.

Jon, I have no need to write my posts taking the incredibly sensitive into mind. I could have said many things. If this upset you, then some of what I said may just have put you over the edge. My post stated a fact that was in the article. Your comment questioned whether I pulled that fact out of my ass, even though it clearly says so in the article. If you are crying because I didn't also add that the health workers tried their best, it would be because you cannot separate fact from emotion.

I love health care workers.. There Jon, does that post meet your approval of sensitivity?

Just to clarify here (not that it will help some), let's have a casual little English lesson.

Here is the sentence in question:

Among the tornado survivors, some wounds that were stitched up had to be reopened because they had not been adequately cleaned, Schmidt said.

A word that encompasses..err.. means the same as "not been adequately" is inadequately. Let us use that word in the sentence instead.

Among the tornado survivors, some wounds that were stitched up had to be reopened because they had been inadequately cleaned, Schmidt said.

Do we all agree both sentences mean the same thing? Good. Now let us look at the meaning of the word inadequate.

inadequate; 1. not adequate (lol), insufficient 2. not capable or competent, lacking.

The statement in question could therefore also read as

Among the tornado survivors, some wounds that were stitched up had to be reopened because they had not been competently cleaned, Schmidt said.

Not competent...hmmm incompetent? Incompetently cleaned? Incompetently cleaned because there was a state wide emergency? Incompetently cleaned because there is a statewide emergency is STILL incompetently cleaned i.e. the patients received "improper (not correct) care".

If the wounds were incompetently cleaned because a swarm of african killer bees attacked the RN or MD that is also understandable but doesn't change the fact that the patient came away with an improperly cleaned wound.

No one hates them or thinks they are terrible people. It happens but Tony is correct, they received improper care.

Thank you.

Signed : Ex- NYS EMT for 8 years.

Thank you Utter, for not taking me saying improper care as anything insulting, as well as shedding light for some on the meanings of the words inadequate and incompetent. When you look at the actual wording, I said it nicer than the article writer did!

RE: My collapsed comment.

My agreement with wrench bender was confined to comments regarding the arm-chair quarterback criticism of emergency care and subsequent medical care. An I stand by that comment.

As to the rest of wrench bender's comments; anyone who has read any of my other posts, knows that I agree with neither his views nor attitudes.

Utter Disbelief,

How many 9/11 injured received "adequate" emergency care on-site or at the first hospital emergency room? Wait until you are confronted by HUNDREDS of injuries, at night and in the rain, before making judgements. Wound infection is frequent IN SURGURY. Anyone who has had surgury knows that they are sent home with instruction to check the wound site frequently and report any reddening or fever. Surgury performed in a STERILE operating room...

Plus, the mold spores with being driven by winds up to 200 mph. At that speed, they could have entered any exposed skin, cut or not) leaving nothing more than a pin-prick or bruise to develop days later.

Bill Marvell,

Try to FOCUS here. Neither Tony or myself or anyone else who co-signed with us are saying that we don't understand why the cuts were not properly cleaned. We are not even saying that we are feeling any ill-will towards the noble folks who provided care. ALL we are saying is the the person(s) who cleaned the wounds of some patients did not do so adequately! The reason that the wounds were not adequately cleaned is because they were trying to save the lives of many many others and wound cleaning would not have been an urgent matter in those moments as say a gushing head wound.

Infection in any health care setting is frequent because hospitals are full of sick (read germ-laden people) and all too often a well-meaning RN or MD or some such will inadvertently infect some one else because they

a) did not wash their hands for the amount of time and with detail required to effectively remove germs

b)did not dry their hands properly

c) did not put on their gloves correctly

d) did not change gloves between patients

e) sneezed into the crook of their arm but sneezes spray germs everywhere.

f) insert any a random reason of people who have been at work for 12+ hours and are just too tired to pay attention anymore.

No environment in a hospital is 100% germ free/STERILE so there is always the risk of sepsis/infections but quite often people do not do enough to prevent them. I have seen MDs and RNs being ultra careful wearing gloves gowns masks etc and then while they are working on a patient then mid-way through someone will ask them to sign something and they take a pen and chart from someone who is not wearing gloves etc and wah la germs!!

Come on Bill. Recognize that we are not assigning hostility to these people merely pointing out that they made an error. Again it happens! especially under these particular circumstances.

I hope I can resist the temptation to come back and try to follow up further with dolts who just don't get it and want to fight and I hope that Bill won't be one such person.

JUST FYI one of my 8 years included the tragic days of 9/11 so I do understand the nature of such emergencies. Triage becomes saving those who can be saved and letting those who cannot be saved without "extra-ordinary effort" go. Tragic and tough to think of but if you spend 8 minutes working up a cardiac arrest versus showing 3 people how to put pressure on a mid-size wound so they don't bleed out you've killed 3 people and maybe saved 1.

Bill, I hope you are just debating proper health care in an emergency situation, and not including yourself in those that believe something derogatory was said about those in the health care field. Since you say you only agreed with wrench bender regarding the arm-chair criticism, can you show me where that took place in this thread?

I'm not sure if 9/11 is a good example. Most of the emergencies involved breathing problems. Unfortunately there weren't many that needed saving and emergency care for large wounds. Certainly not hundreds. But I didn't hear of any infections from that time.

Utter,

Also please see my argument, that this wasn't just visible wound treatment, but direct injection of airborne spores driven by high-speed winds.

This method is used in medicine for mass immunizations.

Bill,

I understand that. I do not believe however that it applies when the statement is that wounds were reopened after being stitched closed.

I can't help myself can I...seems I can resist everything but temptation.

temptation is the root of evil Utter. LOL

Like a train wreck, hard to turn away.

That whole paragraph read like it was written by Beaver Cleaver...

They were not piss poor medics that treated those patients. Do you know how it keep a sterile field out in the field, esp when a natural disaster hits. There was no such animal due to the condition that they were working in. They had to do what was best at the time. And if you read the article, the causative agent for the infection as a microorganism found in dirt. You can irrigate a wound till the solution runs clean, but that doesn't mean that you get everything out. When you have sutures when you cut a body part, they give you a tetnas shot and usually an antibioticto ward off infection. Get a clue about sterility, infections etc, before you make a comment like this.

melrob,

Good analysis. Just to add that the dirt may not have been in a open wound at all, but something more akin to an injection site, little or no blood and nothing to wash out.

PC..............>>Please do not insult Beaver............................

...becoming getting under the skin.

Bad Karma? Next you'll say they were homosexuals

A comment like that might hurt your karma..judgmental asshat!

fred................Do you not think that the trauma alone of what those people went through was enough to lower their immune system?

Karma? What a fool you are.

there is a big difference between big federal handouts and federal disaster aid.....and Tex is right, everything the obamao does with our tax money is based on politics...

Yes, Mohammad, because every other President has had the taxpayers best interest at heart, right?????

Yeah, they had plenty of time, nothing much going on at the time. Ever notice how the most uneducated and inexperienced folks always seem to be the experts. Amazing.

As a person that has suffered with fungal infections from extended jungle excursions, I can tell you that treatment of these issues is not always easy and straightforward.

Even when you know they are there, it can be VERY hard to kill aggressive fungi that have gotten into the body.

So do not speak loudly on issues whereof you are obviously largely ignorant.

You do realize that the hospital, in this small city, was destroyed, don't you???

billc...were you a janitor?

Not necessarily rare from not thinking outside the box. It was diagnosed in these cases, right? If a patient has an infection that doesn't respond to antibiotics, I'm sure most physicians would consider fungal infection in their list of differential diagnoses, and test accordingly. It's more common to have a bacterial infection, though, so of course that is going to be considered the more likely diagnosis.

I'm from the Ohio Valley, where the organism causing coccidiomycosis is very common. Something like 80% of the inhabitants have antibodies indicating exposure. This is well known to all physicians. However, it very rarely causes a symptomatic infection. Just because it's there, doesn't mean it's generally a problem.

Sorry, wrong disease - histoplasmosis.

Sandy,

Good points, both doctors are trained to look at diseases and their sources. Few doctors have treated people exposed to 150-200 mph wind and broad areas of skin penetration by small particles or soil or sand carrying spores.

I live in the Ohio Valley, my father used to say the 20% that tested negative were false negatives.

I hadn't heard that one, Meg. I grew up there, left when I went to college, but still visit frequently. Of the 80-100%, then, who have been exposed, only ONE person I knew ever had the disease. Common organism, uncommon disease.

These doctors DID diagnose these patients, so they were "thinking outside the box". Among pathologists, a pretty common saying is "Look for horses (common diagnoses) instead of zebras (rare diagnoses)". Don't discount rare diagnoses as impossible, because they're not. But common diagnoses are more likely.

If you went to a real university instead of google university where you read all your ingrate conspiracy garbage, you'll know that based on bio-psychological studies as well as correlational analysis that life expectancy in the US is largely a factor of active cortisol levels, rather than diet, socioeconomic status, quality of health care, and education, which are not significantly related.

Your issue of new diseases and fungal infections however are slightly misguided. Most infections in humans have been discovered, but it is hard to test for every single disease in the book for every person. There simply isn't enough time or money in the world for it to make sense. In the time it would take to test someone for every rare disease, 2 more lives could have been saved. When a new disease comes to light, you realize with the amount of micro-orgnanisms that surround each human being, that the more human beings there the more micro-organisms, so...the higher chance of a micro-organism mutating into a malignant form. And this is not to say these mutations didn't happen long ago almost just as frequently either, but long ago, if a few people died of a disease, it was largely unknown or mostly improperly attributed, and the concentration of deaths/people didn't warrant an outbreak.

You can bag on the pharmaceutical companies all you want, but it is the FDA which regulates the approval of drugs in the US, and Bush pretty much pulled the FDA's teeth out. So jump in on the fun and start a bogus pharma company if you want to make some bankroll.

Lol...nurses are not perfect. Just look up your State's Board of Nursing-you can view a list of all the nurse's that have been disciplined, suspended, or had their licenses revoked. Happens more often than you would think!