What is public health? What are public health concerns? We have many discussions about access to health providers.

What exactly are we talking about when we discuss these issues?

Cable news will spend hours upon hours discussing the swine flu epidemic that never takes place.  Yet I find this information on some AOL site:

Latest on Swine Flu

By AOL Health Editors

In response to the number of confirmed swine influenza cases in the United States climbing above 400 and the first reported death, a public health emergency has been declared as a precautionary measure to prevent further spread of the virus. http://www.aolhealth.com/condition-center/cold-flu/swine-flu?sem=1&ncid=AOLHTH00170000000023&otim=1244589563&spid=33206041

Now that gives us no date, but later in the squib (hardly an article) we get a date of  April 29, 2009.

A lot of money, taxpayer money has been paid to prevent this problem.

Now we get the fear on the tellie. The fear gets us thinking about millions of people dead and tens of millions of people severely handicapped for at least some significant period of time.

I watch one conservative pundit on MSNBC yesterday respond in a rather queer manner to the question of uninsured Americans.  He was asked what should be done with the 47 million people who are officially documented as having no health insurance.

He said: Oh, they are taken care of.  There are 'places' they can go.

Okay. At least this fascist was honest. I mean as Scrooge put it:

Are there not enough workhouses? Are there not enough prisons?

And speaking of the two million inmates of our prison system, they must be provided medical care. One infected inmate or guard could wipe out an entire prison population.

Except for those who live in gated communities, all the economic classes interact on some level. Even gated communities have Nicaraguan gardeners after all. A group of people, a small group of people, somehow 'catch' a virus and it could spread like wild fire across this country and then across the globe.

It becomes a national security issue. If we do not have a system in place in this country that includes everyone, how and when will we detect the ultimate virus?

And that system had better be in place to give physical examinations of some kind to all. Or how else would we catch the virus, so to speak. That is how could the virus be detected so that we all do not catch the virus?

But the MSM, as people like to refer to it, spends all this time on the fear of a swine flu epidemic, but does not discuss fifty million people who have no access to medical care at all. Except maybe, there are places these people can go.

I picked this up on one site:

BACKGROUND: The Forty-Ninth World Health Assembly recently declared violence a worldwide public health problem. Improved understand of cross-national differences is useful for identifying risk factors and may facilitate prevention efforts. Few cross-national studies, however, have explored firearm-related deaths. We compared the incidence of firearm-related deaths among 36 countries.

RESULTS: During the one-year study period, 88 649 firearm deaths were reported. Overall firearm mortality rates are five to six times higher in HI and UMI countries in the Americas (12.72) than in Europe (2.17), or Oceania (2.57) and 95 times higher than in Asia (0.13). The rate of firearm deaths in the United States (14.24 per 100 000) exceeds that of its economic counterparts (1.76) eightfold and that of UMI countries (9.69) by a factor of 1.5. Suicide and homicide contribute equally to total firearm deaths in the US, but most firearm deaths are suicides (71%) in HI countries and homicides (72%) in UMI countries. http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/27/2/214

I attempted to get up to date numbers on gun deaths in this country and had a pickle of a time. The best I could doe was find this:

1993 there were 35,595 in the USA according to the International Journal of Epidemiology. 71 percent of all homicides committed with firearms. 61 percent of all suicides involve firearms.

http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/27/2/214  

The Brady site says there have been  30,000 American deaths per year as a result of gun shots for decades.

http://www.bradycenter.org/xshare/pdf/reports/exporting-gun-violence.pdf

But I cannot find the simple figures, year by year. I do not have two weeks to do this, but surely others have found the real figures. I just hear them bandied about all the timeI just wonder, if there is one sixth of the population that has no access to medical care, how do we get our information?  Sure, deaths may be pretty well documented. The police, we assume, find the corpses. And the morgues I assume do the documentation with death certificates. But figures on those permanently injured by gun shots? How do we find that number? ERs surely must report gun shot victims to the police I suppose.

The reason I was caught by these 'figures' was that the lowest economic classes are victims of gun fire. If 30-35 thousand people die every year from gun fire, should we assume three times that number a permanently injured by gun fire?  And after the ER takes out their bullet(s), what kind of after care do they get. What kind of follow up for rehab or even infection is available?

I found several good sites with regard to car accidents. Basically there are 40-43 thousand car-related deaths every year and a couple million people injured. http://www.sciencelobby.com/spellcheck/c/car_accidents_statistics.html

No-fault insurance usually takes care of those injured. But there would be many left out of the loop.

By the way, I kind of worked in this area for decades, and follow up for medical care is not that easy.  If you are poor and have no health insurance, do not get in car accidents.

What is the point of this blog?  I am not sure.

Gun control of some sort is a public health concern from a national perspective as well as a global perspective.

Automobile accidents cause most problems in one year than most wars do during their entire duration.

I will end by referencing something by Kstone on this site:

Kstone: Right. More smokers means more lung cancer, heart disease and other illnesses. According to the CDC, about 443,000 Americans die from smoking-related illnesses each year. http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/kstone/2009/06/getting-smokers-at-both-ends-h.php

What kind of 'follow up' do uninsured people who have been diagnosed with cancer get in this country?