RE: Libertarianism and antibiotics

From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Tue Nov 12 2002 - 17:01:37 MST


Forget market failures, this is interesting and worrying on its own.

This leads me to ask a related question, about colds (ie: unidentified
respiratory tract greeblies), and maybe more generally about infectious
airborne diseases, which is this... how can I stop getting the damned
things? This last 6 months I've more or less constantly been hopping from
one "cold" to another, catching everything that goes around. Normally this
would be a bit of a pest, but pseudoephedrine+codeine saves the day.
However, I'm a singer, and my singing has been devastated by this barrage of
bugs.

I seem to catch these things more than most people, and I really can't
afford to. Does anyone have any good ideas about how not to catch the latest
sniffles? A really good program for avoiding them would become doubly useful
if they start to actually become life threatening, as it looks like they
very well could in the near future.

Ideas?

Emlyn
emlynoregan.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Damien Sullivan [mailto:phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, 13 November 2002 7:35 AM
To: extropians@extropy.org
Subject: Libertarianism and antibiotics

Protection of the physical environment is somewhat conceivable within
standard
libertarian ideas -- torts and all that. Protection of species seems rather
harder to arrange. But probably a lot of people on this list will think
"snail darters, who needs them? If farmers need honeybees they can buy
them."

But now vancomycin bacteria are cropping up -- vancomycin being the
antibiotic
of last resort. Your use of antimicrobial soap or bad use of medical
antibiotics increases my risk of dying. Sounds like a real market failure
to
me. Anders, you might think about staying in Sweden -- at least they seem
to
be taking the problem of hostile replicators seriously. Our new government
here would probably rather subsidize use of antibiotics by agribusiness than
ban and regulate their (mis)use.

http://www.freep.com/news/health/nstaph12_20021112.htm

-xx- Damien X-)

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