July 27, 2016 - Bill of Health

By Christopher Robertson

Whether it is Ebola, H1N1, the season flu, or the next nasty bug that we cannot yet even imagine, if we wanted to efficiently spread the disease, one could not do much better than packing several hundred people into a cylinder for a few hours, while they eat, drink, defecate, and urinate. Even more, to make sure that the disease cannot be contained in a particular locality, we could build thousands of those cylinders and move them rapidly from one place to another worldwide, remix the people, and put them back in the cylinders for return trips back to their homes, schools, and jobs.

We are (hopefully) not going to stop airline travel. But we can make it a lot safer, by ensuring that almost everyone who boards these flights is vaccinated. That’s the thesis of a new paper out this week.

Airlines carry two million people every day. And, prior research has shown that airline travel is a vector of disease. In fact, when the September 11 attacks caused airline travel to fall, seasonal flu diagnoses fell too.

The threat of pandemics is quite real, and more generally, the mortality and morbidity associated with infectious disease is a severe public health burden. About 42,000 adults and 300 children die every year from vaccine-preventable disease. New vaccines are on the horizon.

Arguably, airlines have market-based and liability-based reasons to begin screening passengers, whether for vaccinations generally or for particular ones during an outbreak. Although the states have traditionally exercised the plenary power to mandate vaccinations, and have primarily focused on children in schools, the U.S. federal government also has substantial untapped power to regulate in this domain as well.

By John Tingle

In the UK where health is concerned money is a particularly poor compensator for the loss of a limb, faculty or even a family member. In my experience patients who have suffered adverse health incidents, negligence, more often than not, are not primarily motivated by obtaining monetary compensation. They seek in the main an explanation of what occurred and why, an apology and an assurance that what happened will not happen to anybody else; that lessons have been learned.

The NHS (National Health Service) for decades has been unable to provide a satisfactory complaints and patient adverse incident investigation service which provides these outcomes generally. More often than not patients have to resort to complaining or beginning litigation in order to find out what happened and why and the process that they have to embark on can alienate them even more as they soon hit major and seemingly unsurmountable obstacles. The NHS maintains a defensive and blame ridden culture when errors happen as the terrible events of Mid Staffordshire revealed.

The report Read More