Pave: Health Care Exemplar

Le jour 278 de Sarko

It was recently reported that France has the best health care among 19 developed nations surveyed. This was based on a single criterion (scil., preventable deaths) measured in two one-year periods five years apart. Nonetheless, we congratulate France on the distinction.

And yet this same exemplar failed to prevent a staggering 14, 800+ largely preventible deaths during a one-month heat wave in 2003. It is this very same exemplar that recklessly overmedicates a citizenry beset by clinical depression and irrational fears. Again this same exemplar ranks 18th worldwide in suicides.* And if you are not up to doing yourself, well, this same exemplar is happy to give an "extra-legal" assist.

And then there is this.

DOCTORS ON TRIAL FOR 111 DEATHS FROM CJD

PARIS February 7, 2008 (Scotsman) - Seven French doctors and pharmacists went on trial in Paris yesterday charged with the manslaughter of 111 children infected with a human variant of mad cow disease [Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, CJD], 16 years after the first victim of their alleged negligence died.

... If found guilty the defendants, who are mostly in their 70s and 80s, face up to ten years in jail and fines of up to 150,000 (£112,000). All plead not guilty. The former head of the laboratory at the Pasteur Institute that purified the hormones, Fernand Dray, 85, is also charged with accepting bribes from exporters of the glands.

Bernard Fau, one of the lawyers representing 200 civil plaintiffs, described Dray's laboratory as "a miniscule slum, a sort of sordid back kitchen". It was where all the pituitary glands collected in France ended up for processing.

Dray contacted a scientist in Belgium who furnished him with glands from Bulgaria – allegedly giving Dray a 5 per cent cut on each order. Luc Montagnier, the French scientist who identified the Aids virus, told colleagues at the institute as early as 1980 that the hormone they were extracting could be a carrier of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, but he was ignored.

One of the objectives of socialized medicine is to expunge market forces from medical research and services. The government provides and oversees what it provides. Not surprisingly, government oversight is compromised by its own liabilities. To find fault is to fault the government, to fault itself. Apparatchiks are not so inclined, especially if the fault is lucrative.

The other official at the centre of the case is Professor Jean-Claude Job, former head of the France Pituitary Gland Association, which had a monopoly on collecting the hormone. Prof Job, who is now 85, is accused of failing to respect rules during the extraction of glands "carried out in numerous cases by hospital staff without any medical competence, during which time he continued to reassure (patients and relatives] of the absence of any risk".

Glands were removed via the nose by untrained staff, increasing the risk of also removing contaminated brain matter. The court is expected to hear shocking evidence of glands removed with anything that came to hand, including curtain rods and heating pipes.

Imagine were France anything less than the best.

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* Below are the 19 nations ranked for health care. We have parenthetically added the suicide ranking (within the group/worldwide):

PFFT (What is this?): Socialized medicine for profit 4½ | Rayonnement français 0