Live from Austin!

The Observer:

A shocking 37 million Americans live in poverty. That is 12.7 per cent of the population — the highest percentage in the developed world. They are found from the hills of Kentucky to Detroit’s streets, from the Deep South of Louisiana to the heartland of Oklahoma. Each year since 2001 their number has grown.

Under President George W Bush an extra 5.4 million have slipped below the poverty line. Yet they are not a story of the unemployed or the destitute. Most have jobs. Many have two. Amos Lumpkins has work and his children go to school. But the economy, stripped of worker benefits like healthcare, is having trouble providing good wages.

Even families with two working parents are often one slice of bad luck - a medical bill or factory closure - away from disaster. The minimum wage of $5.15 (£2.95) an hour has not risen since 1997 and, adjusted for inflation, is at its lowest since 1956. The gap between the haves and the have-nots looms wider than ever. Faced with rising poverty rates, Bush’s trillion-dollar federal budget recently raised massive amounts of defence spending for the war in Iraq and slashed billions from welfare programmes.

[...]

Dealing with poverty is not a viable political issue in America. It jars with a cultural sense that the poor bring things upon themselves and that every American is born with the same chances in life. It also runs counter to the strong anti-government current in modern American politics.

c.f. The Onion, which makes the same point rather more briefly.

Here’s a plot outline:

• Narcotics are made illegal.

• Illegal street drugs are often impure, and it’s hard to get clean “works” (syringes etc.)

• Drug users try to avoid infection from injecting, by mixing antibiotics with their heroin.

• Naturally occurring staphylococcus aureus, commonly found in the nasal passages and easily spread by sneezing, rapidly gains resistance to all the common antibiotics.

• A woman in Detroit gets a staph infection. It continues to get worse for over a year, none of the drugs she is given have any effect on the bacteria.

• Doctors are forced to amputate one of her toes. They test the bacteria, and discover that they are resistant to every single antibiotic—even vancomycin, the antibiotic of last resort (because of its awful side effects).

• The woman is placed in total isolation. The CDC are flown in, and 400 people are tested to ensure that they aren’t carrying the killer bacteria.

• Laboratory tests discover two relatively untested drugs discovered in the last two years that can kill the deadly bacteria. The woman is treated under careful supervision, and just about recovers. No other colonies of the bacteria are found.

It sounds like The Andromeda Strain or a prequel to Twelve Monkeys, except it’s a real story. And the sequel may not have a happy ending. Already, nearly 100,000 people die from staph infections every year. If the next resistant strain spreads before being discovered—say, if it mutates in the body of some homeless junkie with no medical coverage—we could see a plague that will kill millions, rich and poor alike.

Still, there’s no reason to legalize drugs or provide universal healthcare, and you’d be a fool and a Communist to think otherwise…