| Certain workers, such as farmers and health care workers, can be exposed to other airborne biologic agents that cause a variety of pulmonary and other infections (see Chapter 21, "The Workplace").
Outdoor air pollutants: The majority of the criteria pollutants and substances classified as air toxins can affect the respiratory tract as well as other organs of the body (see Chapter 14, "Air"). Outdoor air pollutants may be irritating to some people but are especially troublesome to people who already suffer from asthma, emphysema, and other chronic respiratory ailments. |
Kathi Keville
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 The few people who have developed allergies or become sensitive to psyllium were health care workers, such as nurses, who were overexposed to it at work while dispensing it to patients.
Laxative syrups and tablets of the once-popular herbs cascara sagrada and senna are still sold in many U.S. drugstores. Cascara and its European counterpart, buckthorn, are favorites of herbalists and pharmacists alike. |
Ralph Golan, M.D.
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 High-risk individuals are health care workers, ethnic groups with a high incidence of hepatitis in their native countries (Indochinese, Alaskan Eskimos, Haitians, and others), individuals with multiple sex partners and especially those with a repeated history of sexually transmitted diseases, intravenous drug abusers, individuals who receive certain blood products, hemodialysis patients, fetuses and newborns of mothers who are hepatitis B carriers, and household contacts and sexual partners of hepatitis B carriers. |
Arthur C. Upton, M.D.
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| Proper use of these devices along with periodic tuberculosis skin (cutaneous sensitivity) testing, vaccination against hepatitis B, and immunization against measles, mumps, and rubella are important for health care workers.
Other types of biological agents can present a health hazard to this group of professionals. Animal fur, dander, saliva, urine, and other body products can cause laboratory animal allergy in some workers. To minimize this danger, the animal care environment should include cages with filters and rooms with exhaust ventilation and no recirculation of air. |
| The most serious health threat to physicians, nurses, medical technicians, and other health care workers are biological hazards: Physicians and nurses are two to five times more likely than the average person to have been infected with the virus that causes hepatitis B; they are more likely than the average person to be exposed to tuberculosis via respiratory droplets in the air; and they are routinely exposed to chicken pox, measles, and Rubella (German measles). |
John Lauritsen
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 Another problem with the "needle stick" etiology is posed by studies of health care workers who accidentally stuck themselves with needles that had been used on AIDS patients. There have been over 1000 carefully monitored cases of this sort, and in not a single one has AIDS resulted from the accidental inoculation. Only one needle-stick case even developed HIV antibodies — the woman became briefly ill and then recovered completely. |
Arthur C. Upton, M.D.
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| The FDA has recommended that health care workers ask people who are scheduled for surgery or radiologic procedures whether they have ever had a sensitivity reaction to latex (for example, to ask whether the person ever developed itching or swelling around the mouth after blowing up a balloon). |
John Lauritsen
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| Total health care workers With AIDS Base: (8871)
# %
Allegedly Became HIV-Positive...
Through occupational exposure 7 0.1
Not through occupational exposure 8864 99.9
When CDC spokesman Kent Taylor spoke to me, he had difficulty distinguishing "HIV infection" from "AIDS". The same confusion is found in the CDC fact sheet he sent, and the confusion is becoming ever more prevalent in the media.
""Facts about HIV/AIDS and Health-Care Workers", Centers for Disease Control, December 1992. |
Elaine Feuer
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 The categories of risk behavior among the patients included homosexuals, bisexuals, IV drug users, heterosexuals, health care workers, and transfusion-acquired. They were encouraged to continue eating their regular diet, along with True Health's nutritional supplement and aloe vera. Since True Health was testing the synergism of nutritional supplementation in addition to what patients were already receiving, participants were allowed to continue taking medications provided by their own physicians. Five of the patients who entered the study were taking AZT. |
Martin L. Cross
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 Perhaps the gravest problem is that health care workers either lie or are self-delusional. At that hospital, two-thirds of those questioned said they always scrubbed between patients. But when they were secretly observed, it turned out that they only washed between patients one-third of the time.
No one died in that outbreak, but infants at the Children's Hospital in Boston were less lucky. Four infants in the neonatal intensive care unit died of a bacterial infection in the summer of 1997 when they were stricken with pseudomonas aeruginosa. |
Samuel S. Epstein, M.D.
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 However, some responsible health care workers have asked whether or not smoking was perhaps not the sole cause, but one of a number of factors which might be "weakening the system in a way which makes it susceptible to cancer."16 Major concerns along these lines have been raised by research carried out in China where the peasant population smokes heavily and where there appears to be little difference in the rates of lung cancer between smokers and nonsmokers. |
G. Edward Griffin
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 The literature reports various symptoms such as eye, membrane, and skin irritation, as well as dizziness, nausea, and headache experienced by health care workers not using safe handling precautions. In addition, increased concerns regarding the mutagenesis and teratogenesis [deformed babies] continue to be investigated. Many chemotherapy agents, the alkylating agents in particular, are known to be carcinogenic [cancer-causing] in therapeutic doses. [Emphasis added. |
Marion Nestle
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 The following year, the International Baby Food Action Network carefully documented the continued actions of formula companies to give free samples to mothers, health care workers, and hospitals; to use posters, clocks, calendars, gifts, and educational materials to promote products; and to extend the product range to include pregnant women and preschool children—in dozens of developing countries throughout the world. |
Textbook of Natural Medicine 2nd Edition Volume 2Michael T. Murray, ND
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| This is substantially less than the incidence of hepatitis C virus (HCV) seroconversion in health care workers reporting an occupational exposure. From January 1992 through December 1993, 331 (51%) hollow-bore needlesticks, 105 (16.5%) suture needle or sharp object injuries, 85 (13%) mucous membrane contaminations, and 125 (19.5%) skin contaminations were reported. Four HCV seroconversions were observed after hollow-bore needlesticks (1.2%; 95% CI, 0.3-3.0%); no seroconversions occurred after other routes of exposure.2
NATUROPATHIC TREATMENT PRINCIPLES
1. |
John Lauritsen
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| The booth of the Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories featured a gadget called the "Hands Off Tubex Injector", which was a syringe-type device designed so that health care workers would never need to touch any part of the needle that might have been in contact with an AIDS patient. A sign showed a bleeding finger, with the slogan, "Farther From The Point of Danger. |
James A. Howenstine, MD
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 Lycopene
47,894 health care workers were carefully tracked during a four- year test. None had prostate cancer at the beginning of the study but 773 had developed prostate cancer by the finish. Men who ate 10 servings a week of tomatoes and tomato sauce on pizzas had 45% less cancer of the prostate than those eating no tomatoes. Surprisingly, tomatoes on pizza seemed more beneficial than raw tomato, suggesting that heating the tomato paste increases the anticancer effect. |
John D. Lantos, M.D.
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 The opinions, feelings, and values of the other health care workers also matter to me. And I consider my own interests, too, and those of my hospital. I "use" Priscilla as a good teaching case for medical students and residents, and I write and publish articles and books about her. Her continued presence in our hospital generates significant revenue. Her interests are intertwined with those of many other people.
Similar dilemmas arise not infrequently in neonatal intensive care. |
John Lauritsen
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| Many tens of thousands of health care workers have had contact with AIDS patients, and not a single one has developed AIDS as a result of such contact. There is not a single documented case of a household member who developed AIDS from living with a PWA.
'Centers for Disease Control, "Update: Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome and Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection Among Health-Care Workers", Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 22 April 1988 (vol. 37, No. 15).
And there are tens of thousands of sexual partners of PWAs, who themselves remain perfectly healthy. |
| A 1988 CDC study, of health care workers who had been stuck with hypodermic needles that had been used on AIDS patients, found that out of 1428 workers who had thus been accidentally inoculated, only four (0.3%) seroconverted (i.e., developed HIV antibodies), and none developed AIDS! Not a single case of AIDS from a needle-stick injury has ever been demonstrated. (Centers for Disease Control, "Update: Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome and Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection Among Health-Care Workers", Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 22 April 1988 [vol. 37, No. 15], pp. |
| Further, there have been several hundred carefully monitored cases of health care workers who accidentally stuck themselves with needles that had been used on AIDS patients. In no case has AIDS resulted from one of these inoculations.4
The third Postulate requires that the agent create the disease upon transfer from animals made ill by inoculation. Obviously this condition has not been met, as no animal has yet been made ill by inoculation.
It is certainly possible that LAV [now HIV-1] may play some role, perhaps even an important role, in causing AIDS. |
John Robbins
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 They are warned that merely handling the drugs poses "significant risks" to health care workers, including reproductive abnormalities, liver and chromosomal lesions, and hematologic problems.39 If these are the risks faced by nurses who simply prepare the injections, what are the dangers to the patients who have these agents injected or infused into their veins, or who put them into their mouths and swallow them? |
Bob LeBow, M.D., M.P.H.
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 It's not that millions of American health care workers, from receptionists to physicians, are not trying to do their best to serve patients with diligence and compassion. I see many good-faith efforts to help people every day. But our broken system puts unnecessary (and often senseless) obstacles in the way of people getting the health care they need. And the self-destructiveness of the system has only accelerated in the past two decades with the transformation of American health care from what was primarily a caring endeavor to a commercial enterprise. |
John D. Lantos, M.D.
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| Soon, it seems, there will be no more doctors, just health care workers. (Ours is not the first profession to undergo such linguistic transformations. There are no longer any courtesans or prostitutes, just sex industry workers.)
The pundits are everywhere. Ezekiel Emanuel and Alan Brett, two physicians, fear that large managed care organizations will force patients to sever relationships with physicians, that patients will suspect their physicians of financial incentives to undertreat, and that patients will be victimized by plan failures. |
| They are also failures by housestaff to maintain good working relationships with other health care workers and with patients' families. Normative errors make it difficult to practice good technical medicine but for seemingly extraneous reasons. Interestingly, according to Bosk, these are the errors that are judged most harshly. Technical and judgmental errors are seen as an inevitable part of life for a surgeon. A surgeon can make them and still be a good surgeon. Normative errors are seen as character flaws.
Bosk's book is about error. |
Textbook of Natural Medicine 2nd Edition Volume 2Michael T. Murray, ND
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| Risk of hepatitis C seroconversion after occupational exposures in health care workers. Italian Study Group on Occupational Risk of HIV and Other Bloodborne Infections. Am J Infect Control 1995; 23: 273-277
3. Sonnerborg A, Carlin G, Akerlund B, Jarstrand C. Increased production of malondialdehyde in patients with HIV infection. Scand J Infect Dis 1988; 20: 287
4. Breen EC, Rezai AR, Nakajima K et al. Infection with HIV is associated with elevated IL-6 levels and production. ] Immunol 1990; 144: 480
5. Standish LJ, Guiltinan J, McMahon E et al. |
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