Hello, and welcome to Pediatric House Calls. I am…
A Physician board certified in Pediatric medicine with Clinical experience including caring for infants, children and teens – well these days mostly children and teens up to twenty-one;
An Administrator experienced in top medical management for several national health insurance companies;
An Author of health care manuals, newspaper columns and even children's stories;
A Business Medical Consultant for drug companies, insurance companies and
physician practices;
A Veteran of the US Navy in the Vietnam era;
And…
I make House-Calls.
I hope you know who Ryan White was. Through no fault of his own he became the unwitting poster boy for persons with AIDS at a time when public hysteria about the disease was doing almost as much damage as the disease itself. We need to remember him in order to keep a perspective and sensitivity as medicine struggles to keep up with the ever-increasing numbers of newly discovered diseases.
The old adage “familiarity breeds contempt” is, perhaps, no more true than in the case of the AIDS epidemic. I call it an epidemic cause when 1.2 MILLION U.S. citizens are living with it daily (34 million world wide) I think it’s time to call a spade a spade. And that was in 2011, the last year we seem to have tallied the stats.
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This old video calls to our mind just how far we’ve come. We’re different now than we were – thanks heavens! I remember Ryan White but many of you might not. Some of the people in the video have been shown to be the fools that they were; but, unless we occasionally call to all of our minds what Ryan went through, we’re doomed to needlessly inflict the same bigotry in the next issue that comes along.
We’re talking about ‘travel diseases’ which should be considered before taking a trip ‘abroad’ either with or without the family in tow. Yes, from the standpoint of living in the U.S. most of these seem vague and ‘out there somewhere’ but not associated with our daily worries.
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The summer travel season is upon us, at least here in the U.S., and for most of us it means dusting off the car games for the kids to use between bathroom stops as we cruise across the country on vacation.
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This post begins the series of TEN Travel Diseases you shouldn’t forget to consider if you’re lucky (and brave) enough to be taking a vacation this year which involves some degree of traveling – especially across some borders. And remember, the more borders you cross, the more of these you should consider.
You may or may not have even heard of them (hence writing these posts) but be assured, they are still alive and well in the world. And many still here in parts of the United States!
Here is the index to the Ten Travel Diseases series:
Over 15 years ago I wrote an article bemoaning the fact that we were into a generation where even grandmas, the traditional mentor of first-time parents, hadn’t seen a case of measles; and what a loss of valuable information passing across generations.
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