Month: September 2014

When Jim first noticed the man sitting at the next table in the fast-food restaurant, he thought the man was having a heart attack. His hand was on his chest, and he looked scared. As the man’s lips darkened in color, Jim knew he should do someting. Jim got up, walked over to the man, and asked, “Are you choking?”

As he looked back on the incident, Jim was amazed. “I was thinking it was a heart attack, but the word ‘choking’ came out, because in my health class last year, that was what I was taught to ask.”

To Jim’s surprise, the man nodded, and Jim went into action. He called out “Help!” loudly, then turned to the man and said, “I can help you.” As he stepped behind the man, Jim turned to the manager of the restaurant, who had appeared at his side, and said, “He’s choking. Call an ambulance.”

Once behind the victim, Jim wrapped his arms around him and made a fist with one hand. He placed it in the middle of the man’s abdomen, below his breastbone but above his navel. He remembered to place the thumb side of his fist against the man and then covered it with his other hand. Keeping his elbows out, he pressed his fist into the man’s abdomen with a quick upward thrust.

It took three thrusts before he heard the food coughed from the man’s throat and onto the floor. Jim heard the ambulance siren as he helped the man sit down. …

A funny thing happened on the way to adding rheumatic fever to the list of disappearing diseases – not funny as in “ha-ha,” but funny as in strange and troubling.

The hospital wards once set up to care for children with this dangerous disease (it can cripple the heart) had closed. To most young people, the image of the sad-eyed rheumatic fever victim watching from a window while friends romped and played outside was just a scene from some old melodrama, an artistic idea from the past. A dramatic 90 percent drop in the annual rate of new cases since the 1960s seemed to show rheumatic fever was going out with bell bottoms and love beads. Then–like Jason and Freddie and those other indestructible horror movie villains–it was back.

Unwelcome and unexplainable outbreaks of rheumatic fever in places as far apart as Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, and Boston began in the mid-1980s and caused medical experts to take a new look at an old disease. This disease, that usually strikes first among young people between the ages of 5 and 15, can lead to a lifetime with a damaged heart.

In the Begiining — Bacteria

If rheumatic fever is an unfamiliar term to you, how about group A hemolytic streptoccocci? You probably know that better as the bacteria that cause strep throat — and in the beginning, there is strep throat. Though rheumatic fever is not contagious (you cannot “catch” the disease), its potential parents, the strep germs, are. Because these bacteria are easily …

The lure of drugs is strong. For dealers, money motivates. For users, the desire for pleasure or escape usually prompts the entry into drugs. The quest to repeat the experience drives addiction.

Unwittingly, each user fuels an international drug economy that is built on violence, greed, and a callous disregard for human life.

The drug business is an ugly one, full of exploitation, wrecked health, and wasted lives. It also is a big business, the biggest in the world, with an annual volume exceeding $300 billion (some estimates go as high as $500 billion). But it is a big business that law enforcement agencies, national governments, and many small but powerful local initiatives are working to destroy. What are the chances of their doing this in the ’90s?

There are more than 40 million illegal drug users throughout the world — more than half of them in the United States alone. In fact, the United States is the single biggest market for the illegal drug trade.

Once thought of as merely a health or a social problem for drug users and their families, drug abuse in the United States during the last five to 10 years has created a set of problems so destructive and far-reaching that solving them has become one of our country’s top priorities. Why? Consider:

* Chief Justice William Rehnquist of the U.S. Supreme Court reports tfhat the number of drug-related cases in the federal courts has risen 85 percent in the last four years.

* The U.S. Department of Justice …