Originally posted by oxmixmudd
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Public Health policy is NEVER about the outliers - it's about the mean. Case management deals with the outliers - not the advice we give the public. Because that's how excellent public health policy actually benefits everyone.
In 18 years of working with syphilitic patients I saw TWO instances of c. lata, which is two more than most doctors will see in their entire careers. C. lata gets a mention in symptom discussions but we spend a lot more time on P&P rashes. Because P&P is far more common and is most often mistaken by the patient as harmless. I had one patient hit the low probability jackpot with c. lata as her symptom in her second round of secondary syphilis - interesting case for a DIS, totally useless for guiding public health policy. However, had she not written off the P&P rash she had the first time through secondary, there wouldn't have been a second. That's why we set policies around the mean and median, not the outliers.
Also, stop the fearmongering. Cases in the hundreds of thousands in a population of a billion isn't the apocalypse for an infectious respiratory disease. It's not a good thing for the patients but they also aren't breeding the Andromeda strain.
Leave public health to the experts and the rational people. Seriously, this kind of hysteria gives Karens a bad name.
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