I am responding to John Balentine’s particularly uninformed “Here’s Something” column in the July 1 issue of The Forecaster.
As a physician with many years of medical practice and having served in the USPHS Epidemic Intelligence Service during the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, I have acute sensitivity to ignorant refusal to observe essential principles required to prevent epidemic spread of disease.
In 1854, London physician John Snow, using epidemiology to determine that a corner water pump was responsible for the spread of cholera, a commonly fatal diarrheal disease, shut off the pump and stopped the epidemic of cholera that was devastating the neighborhood. Was this an imposition on the immediate community who used the pump to supply their drinking water? Yes. But reliance on scientific methods of epidemiology saved many lives and prevented serious illness among the hundreds in the neighborhood.
Gov. Mills has relied on science to guide her management of this COVID-19 epidemic. Has the restriction of “individual freedoms” impacted public behavior? Yes. Intelligent reflection would suggest that preventing spread of infections and preserving public health to be the greater good by far.
Peter K. Shaw, MD, FACC, FACP
Falmouth
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