Of course we were given our daily dose of 'flu news. CNN's in-house physician Sanjay Gupta updated us at CBS. "You may have heard that up to one in five children were thought to have had H1N1 already," the doctor advised. Do not believe it. That statistic was not based on diagnoses but on a telephone survey: "These are kids that may have had coughs, sniffles--really hard to say they all had H1N1." So what are the real numbers? On ABC, in-house physician Richard Besser told us that this virus has just killed its 1,000th patient nationwide. On NBC, Robert Bazell added that 90 of those deaths occurred just in the last week.
What about the vaccine? NBC's Bazell recalled that federal public health authorities predicted three months ago that by now 100m doses would be distributed: "As of today 11.6m have become available." Bazell's colleague Lee Cowan (at the tail of the Bazell videostream) showed scenes from "the nation's vaccine scavenger hunt" with young people and pregnant women standing in line in Los Angeles and Maryland, Cincinnati and Milwaukee, Las Vegas and Oregon.
CBS cross-promoted 60 Minutes by having Kelly Cobiella file an update us the "strapping 15-year-old football player" Luke Duvall, hospitalized in intensive care in Arkansas. Duvall's plight was profiled by Scott Pelley on the news magazine last Sunday. The teenager has had his breathing tube taken out and is trying to talk again. ABC cross-promoted 20/20 which in turn is publicizing Superfreakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt. In keeping with the day's infectious disease theme, John Berman zeroed in on a Freakonomics chapter about research conducted in Australia into hospital hygiene. Nurses checked on physicians as they did their rounds: the doctors self-reported a 73% compliance rate with hand-washing protocols; the nurses observed the rate at 9%.
ABC's Berman demonstrated how the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles enforces its hand-washing rules. Each doctor puts his unwashed hand in a Petri dish; the culture is grown; and is then displayed on the hospital's computers as a screen saver. "Nothing like the gross-out factor," beamed Berman, before growing a culture from his own palm print.
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