TriumphAnt

“If you’re lost and you look, and you will find me, Time after time.” (Cyndi Lauper)

A recent Ottawa-local television newscast carried an item announcing that City Council is “poised” to buy a new system called “Smartbus” for our public transit system. It will link OCTranspo’s fleet of buses to a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) tracking system for a start-up cost of about $5.2 million. (To be shared with the federal and provincial governments – but not equally; the City’s responsible for $3 million of it.)

Advocates say the system will help reduce operating and maintenance costs, but in practical terms its purpose is to ensure that the city’s buses more closely adhere to their schedules, thus reducing the amount of time that a passenger has to wait at a bus stop.

Well, here’s what I think about that. OCTranspo has a pool of about 1450 drivers. If the City of Ottawa were to budget an annual cost of, oh let’s be generous and say $25* per driver, then OCTranspo could lay out $36,250 every year for the next 143 years (assuming the fleet doesn’t significantly enlarge in that time), and for the same price as it would take to launch the GPS system, buy each and every driver a brand new $%#$@#!!!! wristwatch for each and every one of those 143 years!

Alternatively, we could elect a City Council made up entirely of retired WWII Italian fascists who, given Mussolini’s enormous success at making the trains run on time, could surely apply those same administrative abilities to OC Transpo. (And hey! I hereby nominate his granddaughter to head up the program – http://www.db-decision.de/Interviews/Italien/Mussolini.htm )

Either option would be far less costly than the stupidity of spending over $5 million (!) to link a city bus fleet to a satellite just to keep the drivers on schedule.

* In fact, you don’t even need to spend $36,000+ a year. I buy very nice watches for $9.99 at a kiosk at a local shopping mall. Each comes with a one-year warranty and a replacement battery. Assuming I can find the battery when the one that came with the watch wears out, I get at least a full year, usually longer, out of my $9.99 watch. When the replacement battery dies, I throw the watch away and go buy another watch. Using a similar supplier, OCTranspo could keep its drivers in watches for the next three centuries for the same total “Smartbus” start-up cost that this City Council plans to buy into.

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Am I missing something in all the news coverage about the growing panic in the US over the number of available shots of flu vaccine?

I’m sure I remember reading somewhere that yes, the “flu” carries the possible risk of becoming a serious illness – possibly fatally so – but only for some highly susceptible seniors, infants, and some people for whom current serious medical treatments (on the order of chemotherapy) have so reduced their bodies’ natural immunity that even a strong breeze might be harmful to them.

Here, for example, is a note from UVIG (the UK Vaccination Industry Group), citing a report from the Blair government’s Department of Health’s Chief Medical Office (and one might think if anyone harboured an agenda aimed at pushing as many flu shots onto as many of the public as possible, it’d be a Vaccination Industry Group. But not in this case):

“According to the influenza immunisation program 2004/2005, influenza vaccination should be offered to: (1) All those aged 65 and over; (2) All those aged over 6 months in the following clinical ‘at-risk’ groups: Chronic respiratory disease, including asthma; Chronic heart disease; Chronic renal disease; Diabetes mellitus; Immunosuppression due to disease or treatment; (3) Those living in long-stay residential and nursing homes or other long-stay facilities; (4) Healthcare workers in the NHS are being encouraged to take up vaccination, especially those employees directly involved in patient care.”

The growing hysteria in recent media stories, however, seems to me to be suggesting that we’re on the cusp of a continent-wide epidemic that will kill tens of thousands if something isn’t done now to rebuild the US store of flu doses. We’ve already had George Bush spouting about how he assumes “our good friends in Canada” will help by sending our “surplus” stores of flu vaccine south. (Gee, doesn’t it seem like only yesterday that we were lumped in with the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” and other global whores for al-Qaeda for failing to send the requisite platoon of soldiers to enable our being counted among the “Coalition of the Willing” – those nations who were actively supporting the US and British invasion of Iraq?)

And of course Canada is in these stories wearing our usual hat – our political one. And of course, our politicians in their turn have immediately leapt to the microphones to announce that only when Canada’s needs have been fully met will we ever consider releasing any “surplus” to our “US friends.” (And of course, that’s only so long as they don’t re-target a large number of their nuclear warhead-equipped missiles and then “ask” us again.)

But even more fundamentally, when did the “flu” become such a threat that people are lining up for hours – days even – in order to get their shots? So far during my life, I’ve had the flu several times in several of its incarnations if I recall correctly. And while I remember it was never too much fun, I also recall that it only ever knocked me down enough to call in sick for a couple days at a time. Certainly it never got to the point where I felt I needed a flu shot the next year.

And yet looking at the people featured in current TV news coverage, I see hundreds of young, healthy, indeed apparently robust young and middle-aged adults, waiting in long lines and answering with a panicky edge in their voices when a reporter asks if they’re worried they might not get their flu shot right away.

So somebody tell me please, what do they know that I don’t know?

"In 1918-9 the world suffered a major influenza pandemic in which in one year at least 25 million people died world-wide, including around 228,000 people in Britain. Most experts believe that it is not a question of whether there will be another severe influenza pandemic but when." (Again from the UK government)

Well OK, but in 1918-9 the world was also at the very beginning of its long recovery from circumstances where vast tracts of continental Europe and western Asia had been blasted to atoms in four previous years of warfare, not to mention the staggering debilitation imposed on countries who lost among the annihilated flower of their manhood countless doctors, medical students and young men of science (RIP John McCrae) – exactly the people who would be called on first were the threat of a major pandemic to arise.

Add to this the lax hygiene attending an unprecedented intercontinental relocation in crowded troopships of hundreds of thousands of soldiers both healthy and wounded returning home to dozens of nations, hundreds of cities, and thousands of small towns. And add to this the fact that many of them carried in their weakened bodies the germs and infections picked up in hospitals and aid centres whose focus on sterilization was somewhat lower in priority than the simple need to stop the bleeding. It’s hardly surprising that the last great influenza pandemic erupted in such fertile conditions for a disease to grow and spread uncontrollably.

I just don’t see it in 2004, certainly not on a continent so medicine- and doctor-rich as North America.

Even with our present shortage of flu jabs.

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Finally, here’s another in my ongoing series of things I find amusingly perplexing at work. Just recently, we all received a cheery e-mail from our ADM (Assistant Deputy Minister) about this year’s version of the Workplace Charitable Campaign that’s held every year in conjunction with the country-wide United Way appeal. And I was struck by this part of it:

“It is a pleasure to inform you that the canvassing blitz for the Charitable Campaign within the Communications Branch is completed. We have collected $29,837.20 and our target is $34,120.00. If you have not been canvassed, please communicate with Jane Doe at xxx-xxxx and it will be a pleasure for her to help you help us. Since we do not want to contribute towards a target but rather contribute towards helping people, we will pursue our efforts to collect the remaining $4,282.80.”

In other words, “We missed our target…”

“But we don’t care about targets, do we? We care about helping people. So let’s all get together and help people…”

“…by reaching our target.”

(Or who knows? Maybe I’m somewhat handicapped by my blind insistence on reading what’s actually written there.)

Government of Canada Communications: Do like we say, not like we do.