Sex, Drugs, and Public Health

Filed under: Uncategorized — cbmosher @ 10:07 am Edit This

(Re-posted from July, 2016)

Well, they did it again.

Thursday (July 7) some Democratic and Independent congresspeople tried to get the Dickey amendment language removed from the 2017 Health spending budget. This would have allowed the CDC to fund research on firearm injury and death, so that we could have solid facts on this Public Health epidemic.

Dickey himself has reversed his position on his own eponymous amendment of 1996 and recommends that we allow the CDC to study this Public Health issue (see previous BLOG of June 19). But NRA-influenced congresspersons killed that effort. And, as more Americans are also killed, accurate data – also known as the truth – will be withheld from us all.

The horrific killings in Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights and Dallas this week scream from the headlines, skewing – again – our picture of gun violence. These high-profile killings, which are a symptom of something badly diseased in the body of our society, are not the only killings from guns that we suffer.

There are also incidents like Texas mom Christy Sheats gunning down her own daughters. Sheats is alleged to have written on her Facebook page: “it would be horribly tragic if my ability to protect myself or my family were to be taken away, but that’s exactly what Democrats are determined to do by banning semi-automatic handguns.”

This pre-Dallas (Houston area) tragedy is a stark example reinforcing the findings of the now-classic 1993 Public Health study which showed that households with firearms actually experience MORE homicides than gun-free households (see previous BLOG and original article for details).

That was the study that triggered the Dickey amendment.

Aside from the death statistics related to guns (mortality rates), there’s the issue of non-fatal serious injury (morbidity). In the absence of CDC compiled data, we still have some idea of the scope of this issue. From 2010 through 2013, an average of 76,164 people went to hospitals annually for treatment of gunshot injuries. That’s 208 seriously injured people each day, more than eight every hour.

That, folks, is an epidemic.

If killings and injuries are the SYMPTOMS of this disease in the body of our society, how is the body’s “immune system” responding? Of course, our individual bodies’ immune systems are defenseless against bullets, but society’s body has responded:

1. congressfolks who profit from lobbying by the NRA have responded by maintaining the Dickey amendment, in hopes of keeping us in the dark about this epidemic;

2. investors in gun manufacturing have responded by profiting from the value of firearm stocks. In the few hours between stock market close on Thursday and the opening bell on Friday, the Dallas shooting occurred. Friday morning, Smith and Wesson stock and Ruger stock both INCREASED by 3 to 5%.

If that’s society’s immune system at work, we need a new immune system.

Skewed impressions about gun violence – which are produced in this data void of the Dickey amendment – lead us to react with overheated emotion, anger, and finger-pointing. Almost always, in my experience, fingers point away from the true cause of the disease under these circumstances.

If we want to do something that may actually work (because it’s based on logic and reason, not emotion), we need to utilize the same problem-solving process we use in Medicine every time we see a patient:

1. Examine the patient (in Public Health, we need accurate data to do this)

2. Diagnose the disease (for P.H., it’s a community-wide disease, not just one individual)

3. Treat the disease (P.H.’s main treatment is Prevention).

But we’re not doing that. So, on the day that headlines scream “First Death from Zika in the U.S. !!!” there were (an estimated) 208 serious injuries and 82 deaths from firearms.

You know what to do.

References: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, CDC, New England Journal of Medicine, Daily Kos, New York Daily News.

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