The Major General at Fort Drum recently started his own blog. This is an extraordinary rare thing for a General to have (I think he is the only General with a blog in the army, but a I could be wrong). In fact, the military has taken to discouraging its officers from having blogs. In this case Mike Oates (the general in question) seems to have decided to go against the trend.

His blog is not about expressing his opinion, but about getting feedback from his subordinates. Each blog post is a question for people to sound off on. At first it does not seem that many people took him up on the opportunity. But more and more people seem to feel comfortable spouting off. For example, take a look at this post regarding why many people do/do not want to be stationed in the Fort Drum area. Or this one about allowing civilian air traffic to take off from Fort Drum.

It is interesting to read about the issues that get the people in uniform worked up.

From The New York Times…

For years, doctors thought they had done their jobs if patients came out of an intensive care unit alive.

Now, though, researchers say they are alarmed by what they are finding as they track patients for months or years after an I.C.U. stay. Patients, even young ones, can be weak for years. Some have difficulty thinking and concentrating or have post-traumatic stress disorder and terrible memories of nightmares they had while heavily sedated.

While patients may be suffering lingering effects from illnesses that landed them in the I.C.U., researchers are increasingly convinced that spending days, weeks or months on life support in the units can elicit unexpected, long-lasting effects.

So now some I.C.U.’s are trying what seems like a radical solution: reducing sedation levels and getting patients up and walking even though they are gravely ill, complete with feeding tubes, intravenous lines and tethers to ventilators.

The whole article is interesting in a “No Duh” sort of way.

From the Wall Street Journal…..

You see them everywhere — nurses, doctors and medical technicians in scrubs or lab coats. They shop in them, take buses and trains in them, go to restaurants in them, and wear them home. What you can’t see on these garments are the bacteria that could kill you.

Dirty scrubs spread bacteria to patients in the hospital and allow hospital superbugs to escape into public places such as restaurants. Some hospitals now prohibit wearing scrubs outside the building, partly in response to the rapid increase in an infection called “C. diff.” A national hospital survey released last November warns that Clostridium difficile (C. diff) infections are sickening nearly half a million people a year in the U.S., more than six times previous estimates.

I never stopped to think about this issue before. But it does seem like doctors and nurses are awful lax about how they treat their scrubs.

From Fox News….

Damage to power grids and other communications systems could be catastrophic, the scientists conclude, with effects leading to a potential loss of governmental control of the situation.

The prediction is based in part on a major solar storm in 1859 that caused telegraph wires to short out in the United States and Europe, igniting widespread fires.

It was perhaps the worst in the past 200 years, according to the new study, and with the advent of modern power grids and satellites, much more is at risk.

“A contemporary repetition of the [1859] event would cause significantly more extensive (and possibly catastrophic) social and economic disruptions,” the researchers conclude.

Murphy’s law says that what can go wrong will go wrong. In other words, since the grid can go down, it is a mathematical certainty that it will go down given enough time.

Granted, it is theoretically possible that we could make the grid immune to the solar flare effect before next big storm comes along (whenever that will be). But I think it would be more realistic to count on pigs flying.

Just a reminder that life could turn into a horror story in a heart beat. From the International Herald Tribune…..

Virtually all the flu in the United States this season is resistant to the leading antiviral drug Tamiflu, and scientists and health officials are trying to figure out why.

The problem is not yet a public health crisis because this has been a below-average flu season so far and the chief strain circulating is still susceptible to other drugs — but infectious disease specialists are worried nonetheless.

Last winter, about 11 percent of the throat swabs from patients with the most common type of flu that were sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for genetic typing showed a Tamiflu-resistant strain. This season, 99 percent do.

“It’s quite shocking,” said Dr. Kent Sepkowitz, director of infection control at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “We’ve never lost an antimicrobial this fast. It blew me away.”