Back when public health was taken seriously

This is a poster from World War II:


(http://i35.tinypic.com/dm6zow.jpg)

I may go out of town for a couple days this month, and believe me, if I feel even a common cold coming on before my trip, I expect to get treatment for it. Ted Kennedy said it best: Health care is not a privilege; it is a right.

I've worked too hard to have to miss my yearly vacation I toiled so hard for, and come hell or high water, I will get treatment. I take this shit seriously, because I lost a substantial portion of my teenage years to infections that went untreated because doctors and medicine "cost money."

If Americans had that defeatist attitude back in the 1940s, Europe would have been bowing at the Nazis' feet for decades after. In recent years, I've delivered this same lecture every winter, and nobody learns.

For me, hydrogen peroxide in the ears has been 100% effective at fighting colds, but if that doesn't work this time, treatment will come some way or another. I don't know about you, but I'm standing up for myself.

If it's just a few boogers, I'll let it slide. We all need the joy of wiping our noses on unlikely surfaces. But usually the symptoms are far ghastlier.

To put it more succinctly, public health must be taken more seriously. MUST!!! I don't know what it's going to take for the media to catch on, but hopefully it won't take another war. It isn't taken seriously now, because Big Pharma and other medical corporations have such a sense of entitlement that they put their own profits before the public's well-being.

On that poster, you'll also notice that during World War II, the average American was sick for only 2 days a year. Most Americans today probably can't believe it was ever less than 2 months a year.

We need to produce a modern version of that old poster.