Monday, January 10, 2005

SCHWARZENEGGER FLIP-FLOPS For two years, Arnold Schwarzenegger has been telling us public education in California is one of his top priorities. In his State of the State speech Wednesday, he said schools are a disaster. Well, now he's going to announce a $2.2-billion budget cut. LA Times: "With no clear plan for balancing the budget, mountains of new debt, and so many close friends in the anti-tax business community, it was obvious that a day of reckoning was fast approaching for Schwarzenegger. But who would have thought he would drop a hammer on the state's children?" Why did so many Californians vote for him? They did not vote for a responsible governor, they voted for a terminator. 11:44:05 AM    comment []

MRSA CAUSED BY PRIVATIZATION Guardian: "The scale of the reduction of cleaning staff gives firm backing to the widespread belief that wards have become dirtier and less safe. The figures, compiled by Unison, the public service union, showed that there were 55,000 hospital cleaners, either NHS employees or working in the hospitals for private cleaning contractors, last year. In 1984, there were more than 100,000. He said that since the introduction of market testing for cleaning services in 1983, controlling infections had become more difficult. There is growing concern about how a drop in hygiene standards has contributed to the rise of MRSA - or methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus - which was contracted by 100,000 people last year in hospitals and is the cause of about 5,000 deaths a year. Rates of the bug are thought to have trebled over the past 10 years." We cannot but conclude that the privatization of cleaning services has caused this huge rise in infections. The prevalence of MRSA in Dutch nursing homes in 1998 was higher than that found in 1989 to 1997. 11:32:24 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 Hetty Litjens.