Three Minutes
I want to start today’s column by reflecting on the death last week of Andy Rooney, whose irascible voice graced over 1,000 episodes of 60 Minutes. As a child I watched the program with my parents, waiting for Rooney’s monologue and knowing it meant that the show would soon be over, but that first I would smile. Dan Rather may have gotten to wear that cool trench coat, but Andy Rooney was the guy I wanted to be. It is to his memory that I dedicate this week’s “Needles.”
You know what drives me crazy? It’s how complicated it can be to save a child’s life these days! It seems like any more before you can treat severe pediatric disease you get diverted by your so-called smartphone or Twitter to chat with people you’ve never met who live in Czechoslovakia and just happen to enjoy your favorite TV show! Then there are those fifth-generation cephalosporins, high-frequency ventilators, and fancy-schmancy digital monitors that could probably launch a satellite, but only a 6-year-old knows how to set them to record Murder She Wrote. So I found it refreshing to read that a little soap (chlorhexidine) and some good old-fashioned following-the-instructions could reduce central line infections in the PICU by 56%. It turns out that Grandma was right when she said, “Good sterile technique and proper maintenance of catheter sites can save lives,” (at least that’s what I think she said).
Does it seem to you like these days people worry about too many things? Will that next bite of spinach give you a deadly E. coli infection? Is the elderly woman sitting next to you on the airplane hiding a bomb in her underwear? Will your child’s ADHD medication cause a fatal cardiac event if he doesn’t get an EKG first? That last one got a big boost in 2008 when the American Heart Association recommended all children be screened for heart disease prior to starting stimulant medications, causing a fair number of pediatricians to spit coffee on their morning newspapers. Now, a new study pretty much allows everyone to relax about the whole EKG thing. It turns out, as best as we can tell, ADHD drugs don’t increase cardiac events at all. Personally, I’m looking for a hand-written letter of apology from the AHA, preferably including a coupon for 10% off my next full-priced EKG. I’m also not afraid to eat spinach, unless it comes from the lady next to me on the airplane. I don’t trust her.
Something else I don’t trust is bacteria. It seems like ever since we discovered germs, we’ve known they’re bad actors who should be avoided and sanitized out of our lives. Now, not only are we supposed to think of germs as our friends, but we're supposed to want a diversity of bacteria in our newborn babies! That, at least, seems to be the upshot of a study by Dr. Hans Bisgaard of Gentofte Hospital and the University of Copenhagen. In order to find the cause of nasal allergies in kids he looked, where else? In babies’ butts. There, he found that infants who harbored a wider variety of bacteria in their intestines were less likely to develop allergies later in childhood. As my grandma always said, “Overuse of antibiotics may have wide-ranging unforeseen consequences.” It was that, or, “Always apologize when you’re wrong about drugs contributing to cardiac disease,” I can’t quite remember. At any rate, my grandma was one smart woman!