Occupy Wall Street...Is Hazardous to Your Health

It's been a bad few weeks for the Occupy movement - a homicide in Oakland, a suicide in San Diego, two drug overdose-related deaths in Toronto, and one unexplained death in Oklahoma City. Sad, but not unexpected for such a broad movement. However, there is something more disturbing rising from this movement...

Since at least the 19th Century, public health officials have fought hard to educate the public of the importance of proper hygiene and sanitation. It was observed that people living in cramped, unsanitary conditions caused the fast, virulent spread of deadly airborne diseases. As a result, cities and towns set about developing a system of public sewage disposal, indoor toilets, public parks, and the aggressive education of the need for proper hygiene. The simple act of washing one's hands has save more lives than all the antibiotics in the world. In the last 50 years, the Plague, cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, tuberculosis and many other diseases have all but been eradicated from the "first world" because of these agressive public health systems. Airborne diseases like influenza, that wiped out nearly 16 million people in 1918, are, today, just inconveniences for healthy people.

So why the public health history lesson? Well, as they say, when one does not understand history, one is doomed to repeat it. And when a group of people who have been raised in a world where major problems of public health have progressed to the dangers of "transfats" and "obesity", it is not even in their thought process that there is a reason for proper sanitation beyond the smell. Okay, I will get to my point - the Occupy movement has become a matter of public health! In the last few weeks, there has been an alarming rise in reported cases of airborne and sexually transmitted diseases running rampant through the Occupy camps. Respiratory ailments are so prevalent at the Occupy Wall Street camp that medical professionals have a name for it - "Zuccotti Lung". More disturbing is the antibiotic-resistant strain of tuberculosis that cropped up at Occupy Atlanta. And now, the occupiers are hunkering down for the Winter. Big military-style tents began to crop up at Zuccotti Park this week and it is rumored that there are bunkbeds coming to fill them. No running water, no proper toilet facilities, and cramped, closed quarters - the only thing left is a an outbreak of cholera, and we will be right back to the 19th Century. The health department has shut down businesses for not keeping soup at the proper temperature. Is it going to take a typhoid epidemic for our Mayor to do something?