A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Federal government fumbles again. And again. And again... Never mind the federal inquiry into B.C.’s vanishing sockeye salmon that will soon be underway. How about an inquiry into the federal government itself? I’m sure the feds must be good at something. But they’re routinely quite hopeless, in ways that would almost be funny if it weren’t for the harm being done to Canadians and the country. How have they hurt us? Let me count the ways: H1N1 - If this had really been “the big one,” we’d have been as hooped as a New Orleans hurricane victim waiting for rescue after Katrina. As luck would have it, we’ve been allowed to test our national pandemic strategy with a virus that wasn’t as terrifying as expected, but picture the shape we’d be in right now had the new flu strain remained as lethal as it was in its early days in Mexico. Canada has a 550-page pandemic preparedness plan, developed by the Public Health Agency four years ago after a botched national response to the SARS crisis. But ...

Excuse me, doc - any advice for the uncertain? What are we to take from the fact that a majority of adult Canadians don’t want to be immunized against the H1N1 flu? I know how they feel. I’m still on the fence myself about whether to get the shot. Being immunized definitely appears to be the logical, civic-minded choice, but there’s this part of me that’s just really hesitant about getting a flu shot. And 51 per cent of the Canadians apparently feel the same way. Asked in an on-line poll this month about whether they’d be getting vaccinated against H1N1, more than half said no. That’s up significantly from July, when only 38 per cent were saying no. That fact must be a great disappointment to the public-health officials working hard on the H1N1 front. People were alarmed as all get-out when the new strain of influenza first took hold in Mexico, and the task back then looked like it was going to be about keeping a worried public calm until a vaccine could be developed. Instead we’ve ...

Confessions of a disease vector Like many other Greater Victorians, I caught a bug recently and am sick this week. I doubt it’s the infamous “swine flu,” seeing as any number of more common colds and flus are hanging around out there right now. But for a moment let’s pretend that it is, if only for the purposes of demonstrating that there isn’t a sniff of hope in these modern times for containing the spread of new viruses. The new H1N1 flu is contagious 24 hours before you show any symptoms and for at least seven days after you get sick, as are all flu viruses. That means I was contagious as of last Saturday. That was the day I was shopping in Seattle with my daughter and stepdaughter. We were jammed into the basement of Nordstrom Rack with at least a thousand other women over the course of the afternoon. I can’t imagine how many articles of clothing I handled that day - how many hangers I jostled, changing-room doors I pushed open, people I brushed up against while engaging in the in...