Day 7 - 80 -- How we got here

The Google doodle today celebrated a physician who studied spread of disease -- rudimentary epidemiology. In the 1840s, Dr. Semmelweiss worked at a hospital in obstetrics. Many women died a few days after giving birth. Autopsies showed the cause to be puerperal fever -- a bacterial infection of  the female reproductive tract. This was decades before the theory of microorganisms was postulated. Yet, Semmelweiss noted that doctors went from the birthing room to the morgue to do an autopsy and back to the birth room. In this time before surgical gloves, he believed that the cause of the infection was being carried by doctors and then being transmitted to a woman in labour. His solution was to ask the physicians to wash their hands between the two major activities of their days. Of course, this was met with derision and took much convincing to get them to give it a try. Long story short -- the incidence of infection was greatly reduced and basic sanitation practices changed.

I'm sure many of you can see parallels with our current situation. Naysayers who don't want to accept that they could cause infection exist now. Hand washing isn't carried out as it should be, if at all, even after the major educational effort present in our daily lives right now. Luckily, public health efforts have come a long way in the past two centuries. As we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation, there are small (well in the grand scheme they are small) actions we can all take to reduce the spread of disease -- distancing, isolating and hand washing. We've learned from other outbreaks how to cough and sneeze into an elbow and not to shake hands. We can put centuries of knowledge to work now and it will help ourselves and others.

Sitting at home for day 4 remains difficult, but the alternative is even scarier. One thing I noticed yesterday is that I really dislike the colour of the walls in my bedroom, which is where I often do work when not at the office. It is getting old, though <smile>. I will need to move myself around the house to avoid looking at those sad 'builder' beige walls. <smile>. These thoughts brought to mind a song -- imagine that! <grin>  Enjoy!

In My Room -- The Beach Boys