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WHO Issues a List of 12 Most Worrying Drug-Resistant Bacteria (medicalxpress.com)
Artem Tashkinov quotes a report from Medical Xpress: The World Health Organization has issued a list of the top dozen bacteria most dangerous to humans, warning that doctors are fast running out of treatment options. WHO said the most-needed drugs are for germs that threaten hospitals, nursing homes and among patients who need ventilators or catheters. The agency said the dozen listed resistant bacteria are increasingly untreatable and can cause fatal infections; most typically strike people with weakened immune systems. At the top of WHO's list is Acinetobacter baumannii, a group of bacteria that cause a range of diseases from pneumonia to blood or wound infections. In recent years, health officials have detected a few patients resistant to colistin, the antibiotic of last resort. So far, doctors have been able to treat them with other drugs. But experts worry that the colistin-resistant bacteria will spread their properties to other bacteria already resistant to more commonly used antibiotics, creating germs that can't be killed by any known drugs.
I'm a Brit (on disability welfare myself actually), and I'm pretty sure I'd be dead without socialised healthcare. Which, also, has fuck all to do with the quality of healthcare available. If you want shorter waiting times for non-critical conditions (the ones that require something fancy like major surgery but that you can easily survive a few months or so waiting for), doctors more willing to try very expensive and not very successful treatments etc, nothing stops you from having private health insurance and seeing private doctors, if you can afford it. The only difference is that if you can't afford it, you still have access to free, high quality healthcare. I've never understood this argument - it's not like having socialised healthcare makes private healthcare illegal.
Spot on. I'm a Brit too and would be quite happy spending my whole life paying into the NHS without ever having to use it.
The American system where you can get hit with a disease, or have an accident, and then die because you can't afford the treatment is barbaric and medieval.