It is time to put the care back in health care

This winter was the strangest one that I have ever seen when it comes to being sick. I was actually ill with some kind of lung infection for three months. Many of my family members and friends were also sick with this type of infection. It was terrible as I had a sore throat for awhile, then lost my voice and then coughed for a couple of months.
It seemed like at one point just about everyone I was coming in contact with had this sickness. I believe that many elderly or health compromised people passed away this winter and spring with whatever this lung sickness was. When this type of serious illness begins to spread and finally ends up in remote First Nation communities it often ends up sending people to the hospital and in some cases this results in infections becoming deadly.
Many people don’t know that in remote First Nations there are no doctors available at the local hospital and often nursing staff is limited. If people get really sick they have to be flown out of the community to a health facility where there are doctors and specialists. As a matter of fact, remote First Nation communities don’t even have dentists or optometrists. All of these professionals routinely visit the communities but they are not on site full time. So when a remote First Nation person gets critically ill, if he or she is lucky and everything falls into place properly they will be treated in the community by health professionals or flown out to a regional health facility. If things don’t fall into place then people often end up passing away. That happens to some extent in many non Native northern Canadian towns but more so in remote First Nations. The proper high level health care and medical equipment is just not available.
So, you would think that if there was a very serious and seemingly highly infectious upper respiratory infection going around our health officials would be alarmed and letting people know. Well, we do have government agencies who report on the flu and watchdogs like the World Health Organization (WHO) that monitor and warn us about all kinds of sickness but somehow this lung illness that hit so many this winter and spring went unnoticed. How can that be? It seems that it just did not fit into the criteria that these agencies understand. Actually, most of the reading I have done on the subject of flu, colds, viruses and bacteria mostly resulted in confusion.
People I know this winter who ended up with this terrible sickness didn’t even know what to refer to it as. Was it a flu? Was it a cold? Perhaps it was human metapneumoviruses, parainfluenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV for short), adenoviruses and rhinoviruses which can all cause flu like sickness. Flu Watch reported this year that there was a surge in RSV.
As far as I can figure out this could be what I was ill with and what affected so many people. The virus attacks the lungs and breathing passages but most people tend to recover within a week or two. I don’t know anyone who did. RSV is the most common cause of pneumonia and bronchiolitis in young children and can create problems for anyone with compromised immune systems or those over 65 years of age. Secondary infections also seem to be a problem for people and other organs in the body can be affected as a result of the initial illness.
So, while all the experts claimed that this was such a wonderful low case year for the flu it seems that more people than ever were sick with something else that did not fit into that criteria. The problem is nobody including the experts seem to know what it was or is. That does not make me feel very secure about health monitoring and reporting. Finally, after seeing a couple of doctors and talking to others who were sick with the same symptoms I ended up on an antibiotic that worked so I guess I had a bacterial infection that was secondary. In a few days I was feeling much better after having been ill for three months. I still don’t have a good idea of what I was sick with and the sad part is there are no health professionals who can tell me. It seems to be a mystery. I believe we are in this situation because we feel it is more important to spend billions on wars and giving tax cuts to the very rich rather than in putting big dollars into our health care system. So, as a doctor I met once aptly pointed out to me ... just don’t get sick and if you do...good luck.