2003-12 Vital Source Mag – December 2003
FluMist
By Lucky Tomaszek Many people are relieved to hear about the new FluMist vaccine. No one likes needles, and it seems the makers of FluMist are counting on that fact to convince consumers to buy. FluMist is the first influenza vaccine that is not a shot. It’s a nasal spray. One good dose up the nose and you’re protected for the whole winter. Or are you? Traditional flu shots are made from killed influenza virus, which cannot cause a case of influenza in either the recipient or anyone who comes in contact with the recipient. Killed viruses are considered safer, though shorter acting. In the case of the flu shot, this is not a disadvantage, because protection only needs to last for a year. By the following year, a new flu shot is available that is intended for whichever influenza strain is most prevalent. FluMist is a lot different from its first cousin, the annual flu shot. For starters, it’s not intended for use by the people who are normally urged to receive a flu vaccine, the elderly and the immuno-compromised. FluMist is being marketed for healthy people ages 5 to 49. That’s because it’s made from the live influenza virus, which could be harmful if given to someone who isn’t completely in the pink. Should you take it up the nose? As a matter of fact, the list of people who should not use FluMist is pretty long, and includes: toddlers; the elderly; anyone with eczema or asthma; people who are allergic to eggs; children and adolescents receiving aspirin therapy; people who have a history of Guillain-Barré syndrome; pregnant women, people with reactive airways disease, people on corticosteroids like Prednisone®, Medrol®; and obviously immuno-compomised people like cancer patients, people with HIV or AIDS, and organ recipients. There is additional concern about the FluMist vaccine precisely because it’s a nasal spray rather than an injection. Most people who have ever needed to take a nasal spray medication can tell you that it often leads to sneezing, sometimes repeated sneezing. When you’ve sprayed a live vaccine up your nose and you sneeze, the live vaccine is shot across the room at 100 miles per hour. This can be troublesome for anyone, but especially so for small children in school and people living with immuno-compromised family members. Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, D.O., President and Medical Director of the OsteoMed II clinic in Strongsville, Ohio, shares this concern: “One of the most troubling concerns over [FluMist] is the potential for the viruses to enter directly into the brain… The olfactory tract has long been recognized as a direct pathway to the brain. Intranasal injection of certain viruses has resulted in a serious brain infection called encephalitis… Time will tell whether the live viruses in FluMist will become linked to cases of encephalitis.” IF IT WALKS AND TALKS LIKE A DUCK… The reported side effects of the vaccine are also interesting to note. According to the FluMist package insert, 72�f adult recipients reported side effects […]
Dec 1st, 2003 by Lucky Tomaszek
Measuring Mayor Norquist
By Raymond Johnson As the final term of Milwaukee Mayor Norquist comes to a close, it is time to assess his impact on the city. I’ll leave it to others more qualified to weigh his affect on property taxes or schools, on government efficiency or city services. Here, per the name, I will be concerned about the developing city. Perhaps nothing indicates the Mayor’s interest in these matters more than the next job he is taking. John O. Norquist will become the President and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), a national advocacy organization dedicated to promoting good urban design. Mr. Norquist had served on the board of directors, and has shown supporters and skeptics alike the possibilities for using the principles of the CNU in existing cities. Perhaps the best way to understand the impact of his work is to look at some of the projects built on Mr. Norquist’s watch and assess their overall impact on the city. THE GOOD The Park East Freeway Demolition This has to be the apotheosis of Mr. Norquist’s tenure, bringing together key elements in his thesis on good urban design: freeways are bad for center cities because street grids are better movers of traffic; center cities are desirable because of their efficient access to people and markets; and government doesn’t need to subsidize private development. Sure, it will be a long time before it is ‘finished’, and we will probably get more than a few bad buildings, but if you love cities, this is about as good as it gets. The Riverwalk The Riverwalk is a close second to the Park East project. This is urbanism at its finest. Small-scale, pedestrian-oriented, and snaking through our city, the Riverwalk gives urban dwellers and visitors a different path through the city. Granted, its’ design, in places, is a bit pedestrian itself. The materials are sometimes cheap, the style retrograde, the details sloppy, and it often connects poorly with both the water and the city streets. But early mistakes lead to ongoing improvement. And really, the chief benefits of the Riverwalk are the improvements to our overall urban structure downtown: increased pedestrianism, new residences, shops and restaurants, and the reconnection of the city to its river. Third Ward Redevelopment The redevelopment of the Third Ward has been nothing short of amazing. Once an area of abandoned and underused storage buildings, the Third Ward is booming with loft conversions, new construction and restaurant and boutique openings. The overall street-scaping is of a decent muscular industrial style, in tune with the manufacturing history of the area. An amazing opportunity was missed when the area nixed a beautiful modern parking garage designed by Gastrau Furer Vogel Architects for the piece of junk you see standing on the corner of Water and Erie. This raises the question: as new construction pressures build, will the Third Ward build beautiful modern buildings to complement its beautiful existing ones? Time will tell. 6th Street Viaduct Until a few years […]
Dec 1st, 2003 by Vital Archives
Living Without Santa
By Lucky Tomaszek One night in December of 1978, when I was 6 years old, I stayed up very late watching a toy drive on TV. As I gazed longingly at all the dolls and drums and toy trains piled up for needy children, the host announced the arrival of Santa Claus — he was coming to pick up the toys! I was so excited that I sat straight up on the couch to get a better look. “Ho Ho Ho!” shouted a deep voice, and I got goosebumps. I could hear him stomping onto the set and suddenly, there he was! He was tall and round, dressed in a red velvet suit with black boots. And he was African American. I watched in bewilderment as this jolly Santa picked up the collected toys and thanked the viewing audience for their generosity. The Truth comes out. The next morning, I had a million questions for my mom about the toy drive. I started with questions about the toys I had seen and who would be getting them. Then I said, “Why was Santa on TV black, and Santa at the mall white? How can he change his skin like that?” Then and there, she told me the whole truth, straight out, with no holds barred. I was devastated. I felt like the adults were pulling off the biggest conspiracy ever. I told my mom I needed to get to school right away and tell all of my friends The Truth. We were being lied to, and it had to stop. Mom explained that I really shouldn’t tell the other kids, as it would make them sad. I didn’t understand it — I was taught not to lie. And in our radical house, I was also taught to stand up for injustice and help others in need. In my kindergarten mind, explaining The Truth to all of the other kids was merely fulfilling what I was already seeing as my role in life. Despite her advice, my mom was called to pick me up early that day, but not until I’d broken the hearts of four or five of my classmates. The true meaning of Santa. As I started planning my own family, I knew I wanted Christmas in my house to be different from what I felt it had become for most Americans. At the time, I was in the middle of spiritual crisis, unsure of my beliefs regarding Christianity and the role of the holiday in our culture. As a long-time retail professional, I detested the shopping and the spending and the consuming. But I didn’t have my own set of beliefs around which to build a “new” holiday celebration. I was a little lost. My first baby was born in July of 1995 and I spent the next 5 months pondering how I was going to present Christmas to her. My husband and I exhaustively discussed the holiday and what message we really wanted her to take with […]
Dec 1st, 2003 by Lucky Tomaszek
Iraq’s Catch-22
By Paul McLeary “That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” Yossarian observed. “It’s the best thing there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed. — Joseph Heller, Catch 22 Like much else in the Iraq today, the number of unemployed Iraqis remains a subject of some speculation. The chaos that still reigns on the ground more than six months after the president famously declared “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” precludes a serious tallying of many things — the death toll, crime rates, and unemployment statistics are just a few. What we do know is that in late May, Presidential Envoy to Iraq Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army, putting some 400,000 troops and support personnel out of work in one fell swoop. While some unofficial estimates claim that up to 60 percent of Iraqis are unemployed, many of these reports are of, as they say, suspect authenticity. The closest thing we have to an official figure was released in October by Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Sami Azara al-Majoun, who estimated 8.5 million jobless Iraqis. In a country of 23 million people, that’s nothing short of devastating. Adding to the problem is an estimate that more than 10,000 Iraqi plants and workshops are either out of service or working at a mere 10 percent of their prewar capacity. Given these facts, it’s easy enough to conclude that the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), headed up by Bremer, needs to start making some serious headway in rebuilding the infrastructure and getting people back to work. The solution seems self-evident. Rebuild the economy along with the roads. With Iraq’s infrastructure literally having to be rebuilt from the ground up, the solution would seem self-evident. You have billions of dollars coming in for reconstruction projects, and a pool of millions of unemployed desperately in need of a job. In a well-coordinated effort, two proverbial birds could be killed with one stone. The money could be directly poured into kick starting the local economy by paying Iraqis to rebuild roads, utilities and schools. But it’s not playing out this way. Many U.S. subcontractors tasked with rebuilding Iraq are refusing to hire Iraqis to do the work, opting instead for cheaper migrant labor from South Asia. In a Financial Times article in October, Colonel Damon Walsh, head of the CPA’s procurement office, was quoted as saying “We don’t want to overlook Iraqis, but we want to protect ourselves. From a force protection standpoint, Iraqis are more vulnerable to a ‘bad guy’ influence.” The same piece also quoted a Pakistani manager in Baghdad for the Tamimi Company, which is contracted to cater for 60,000 soldiers in Iraq, as saying “Iraqis are a security threat. We cannot depend on them.” Costs could be reduced by up to 90�But that would be bad for the economy. Some in Congress are making noise about this potentially disastrous situation. This past September, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), Ranking Minority Member of the Committee on Government Reform, sent a letter to director of the White […]
Dec 1st, 2003 by Vital Archives
Frizell Bailey understands the blues.
By Frizell Bailey 2003 has been dubbed the Year of the Blues, marking the 100th anniversary of W.C. Handy’s making some of the first blues recordings in 1903. I grew up in a Mississippi town so small that we had only one stoplight until they took it down in favor of stop signs a number of years ago. The town was small but the blues was large. At most gatherings, and in the hand full of bars in our tiny downtown, blues was what you expected to hear. There was a radio station in Jackson, the only real city in the state, that played all blues, except for a hip hop show late nights and gospel programming on Sundays. I hated the blues. For me it represented everything I wanted to separate myself from. Blues was the music of the downtrodden, the destitute and the uneducated. Desperately trying not to be the small town boy that I was, I turned away from the folksy sound that permeated my childhood. It wasn’t until moving to Jackson to attend college in ’91 that I began to appreciate the blues. It was a three-pronged process, beginning with a part-time job at the largest independent record shop in town, where I suddenly had all manner of music at my disposal. Then there was the influence of the store’s owners and my coworkers, who seemed to agree with Louis Armstrong. “If it sounds good, it is good.” So I gave everything I could a fair listening, from Aabba to Frank Zappa. The groundwork was laid. In 1997 I began teaching in the Mississippi Delta. For those unfamiliar, the Delta is the poorest region in the country. But it is also the birthplace of the blues. Many of the biggest names in the blues came out of this region, from B.B. King and Robert Johnson to Elvis Presley. He may be known as the king of rock and roll, but Elvis was first and foremost a blues man. It’s easy to see why the blues was born in this area. The land is rich, but the people are poor. Even today, most people work in agriculture or don’t work at all. It was amazing how much this land affected me. I finally began to get it. The final phase in the development of my appreciation of the blues occurred at the Subway. The Subway is a juke joint in Jackson offering some of the best live blues in America for a mere $5 cover. Located in the basement of a building that used to house the only hotel where black people could get reservations, Subway sells cans of beer on ice in a bucket and “blues” dogs at the house next door. Friday and Saturday nights, the joint is jumping. People crowd into the tiny space, black and white alike, and stand shoulder-to-shoulder, bodies gyrating, souls engulfed by the music. Whereas I once winced at the sound, today my heart swells, soaked to the core with […]
Dec 1st, 2003 by Frizell Bailey
