They shut down unsafe restaurants, don;t they?

[bugscufle]

About 18,700 people die in this country each year from drug-resistant staph infections, according to a federal study released Tuesday — more deaths than the United States sees from AIDS annually.

The study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, scheduled to be published in today's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first of its kind to track methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA.

The once-rare, drug-resistant germ causes more than half of all skin infections treated in U.S. emergency rooms, the CDC reported.

The CDC reported this year that about 17,000 people in this country died of AIDS in 2005.

[Catalpa]

What's this got to do with restaurants?

And, no unsafe restaurants don't always get shut down...especially not if the restuarant owner is prominent, or powerful politically. A restaurant found to have critical violations is given many opportunities to make corrections. If they refuse to comply, there is no penalty unless the health officer is supported by the local commisioners and the city/county prosecuting attorney. Without that support, and given the liberal biases of almost every newspaper/tv station, any effort to shut down a restaurant due to health code violations is simply an exercise in frustration.

Where you should be more concerned about the resistant bugs is the school - how often are the classrooms actually disinfected and cleaned? Not to mention the locker rooms. Here in Michigan we just had a child die to a staph infection he appeared to catch in school.

[CarolAnn]

Catalpa,
The connection is - if they shut down unsafe restaurants that make people sick why aren't they shutting down emergency rooms that make people dead? !

And more people died of staff infection caught in an emergency room than died of aids that year - that's pretty shocking!

:o