Lee Barry's List: Health

• With health authorities now gearing up for what could be a huge vaccination campaign against a new strain of swine flu, the experience of 1976 is raising a note of caution.
• The feared swine flu epidemic of 1976 never materialized. And several hundred people, including Ms. Kinney, who is now 68 and lives in Gig Harbor, Wash., developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological condition that causes temporary muscle weakness or paralysis. More than 30 of those people died.
• One hypothesis was that the vaccine, rushed into production, was contaminated with Campylobacter, a type of bacterium that does cause Guillain-Barré. The Institute of Medicine said this was unlikely but could not be totally excluded.
• A more likely explanation is that something in the vaccine resembled something in the nerve cells. When the body’s immune system mounted an attack on that component of the vaccine, it also then attacked the lookalike in the nerves.

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• Instead, a patients' REAL record should accessible to him or her online, and those electronic medical records (as opposed to PHRs) across the country should just talk to one another like ATMs do.  Finally, docs like me need to keep your digital health history accurate and by updating your medications, allergies, and diagnoses regularly. 

• Bagged salads, developed in the 1980s, provide a convenient solution for eating leafy greens. But where a contaminated head of lettuce might have made one family ill, bagged salads, which combine leaves from dozens of heads, have the potential to spread the germs.
• Public health experts say the complexity of the food supply illustrates the need for tougher government oversight, including more field inspectors.

• Some people are tempted to opt out of the modern industrial food system altogether. But doing so can put them at risk of the very diseases that were banished from the food supply decades ago.

  Concerned about health, Ms. Tardiff, the California nurse, bought organic and less processed foods whenever possible. She decided to try raw milk, believing the unpasteurized product would supply helpful organisms.

  Instead, she got a dose of an unhelpful germ: campylobacter, easily killed by pasteurization. The ensuing intestinal illness caused a debilitating nerve disease. Ms. Tardiff communicated by blinking for months, and still cannot stand or use her hands.

  “This has been life-altering,” she said. “All I want to say is, ‘Be careful.’ ”

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