Staying Focused

Summertime, and the living is easy for some—including, hopefully, our children—but not, we know, for us. Our important work continues.

In this issue, Gene McDaniel highlights an ongoing need to educate all the members of our community about living safer lives, including those who are hard to reach. Heroes Behind the Headlines keeps us focused on our day-to-day task of being there for the emergent needs of our children, teaches us that sometimes less is more, and helps us see the system improvements we still have to make.

We must all work together if we hope to make progress, and an important step is knowing who our allies are. Our National Focus column highlights the important, but often unappreciated, work of our school nurses, who are dedicated and ready to collaborate in caring for sick or injured students.

Our News You Can Use relates a somber example of the truly preventable tragedies that somehow occur every day in spite of our best efforts. We will not be putting ourselves out of business any time soon.

Both our Feature Presentation and TRIPP Enhancement sections address a most pressing issue: Protecting ourselves and those we treat from the spread of disease. It seems ironic that, as our anxiety over potential human cruelties has continued to drive our recent agendas, suddenly we are faced with the feared reality of bioterrorism—but it is nature rather than man that has unleashed SARS. Thus we are reminded again of the power and impact of nature on our modern world.

It appears to many that, because we have geared up for the possibility of human bioterrorism, laying plans to manage an outbreak of anthrax or smallpox, we were better prepared for SARS. And I believe this to be true. Our public health infrastructure has been strengthening after many years of neglect.

However, we have to recall that even though SARS appeared suddenly on all of our differential diagnoses back in the early spring, significant time passed before EMS agencies across the country started to have SARS plans in place. And we are all concerned about the coming winter season. Will we be ready to handle large numbers of patients, should they appear? We watch and wonder as SARS continues to spread in other parts of the world.

Therefore, fittingly, in this issue we highlight practical and detailed guidelines for our valued prehospital caregivers to protect themselves, and thereby protect others, from the spread of disease. That is good.

We are certainly doing better than in the past; but I feel we need to do better still as we prepare for the worst that nature—or humans—may bring.

Dr Foltin is director of the Center for Pediatric Emergency Medicine