Scrubbing

One public transit pet peeve of mine: health care workers who wear scrubs on public transit (particularly, but not exclusively, city buses). I'm not a germ fiend, but any time I see various health workers in their scrubs on the buses (and I see it all the time), I just can't help but wonder. I don't know if anybody's done cultures of city buses, to see what's there, but I imagine there are a lot of germs there -- particularly on those fuzzy seats; I imagine the old hard-shell plastic seats were somewhat less germy, but the fuzzy seats that replaced those are probably little septic gardens. And scrubs at least nominally carry the onus of being worn in a place where cleanliness matters, or should, where you might have all sorts of immunocompromised patients there whose interests might not be well-served by somebody coming into their hospital room wearing funky scrubs that were worn not only through the city, but on the buses. Some time may be saved and some "Hey, I'm a health care worker" social status preserved by wearing scrubs on the buses, but is it worth it if it exposes your already-sick and/or injured patients to outside germs?

Stemming the tide

I think about this a lot (below). Our country's falling behind...

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/08/25/129422571/climate-energy-and-stem-cells-ceding-the-frontier

The wingdings pound their angry, reactionary drums on these issues and the rest of the world moves forward, leaving us behind.