Yellow Jackets and EpiPens

Their work for the year almost done, the  yellow jacket wasps now have time to explore human spaces, and the leftovers they contain.

There is much to explore. Fruit is ripening on the trees and bushes. The last of the sugary summer drinks are being spilled on decks and patios. The wasps are out in large numbers, tasting it all.

  

We appear to be heading into a record fall wasp season. Yellow jackets seem to be everywhere already, especially if they make you nervous.

Most people have little reason to worry about wasps, provided they resist the urge to swat them, and avoid their nests. But for some people the hyper-activity of autumn yellow jackets is the season of fear.

Large wasp populations are likely the result of a milder winter. More queens than usual lived through it. Wasps die off during the winter, except for some queens who live to start new colonies each spring.

My wife recently walked into a yellow jacket nest and suffered about two dozen stings. She is not allergic to their venom, thankfully. Many people who are carry an EpiPen, the epinephrine injector that buys time for anyone suffering severe allergy shock.

EpiPen is the only easy-to-carry, easy and quick-to-use medicine for people who suffer severe allergy shock. This includes many children dangerously allergic to some food items, peanuts to name a common one.

EpiPen is the focus of a yet another pricing scandal in the United States. Profit greed has tripled the price of the life-saving device in the U.S. Mylan Pharmaceuticals, which acquired the EpiPen rights in 2007, has increased its price by more than 400 per cent.

The drug epinephrine itself costs only pennies. The EpiPen allows for super fast, uncomplicated delivery. You simply take it from its plastic case and jab it against your thigh.

So if you live in the U.S., have a severe allergy to stings, or have a child with a food allergy, you have to cough up at least $600 U.S. The pens expire after 12 months.

Teresa Voght Lisek, interviewed for the Mother Nature Network, said her husband and two children each have severe allergies. She says that extra pens must be kept in several locations in case of emergency. Buying enough to cover them safely would cost $5,600.

The cost of one EpiPen in Ontario is just over $100 Canadian plus provincial tax. Our health care system protects us from any outrageous price increase like the one in the States, but don’t be shocked if someone finds a loophole.

The U.S. price of an EpiPen was $57 when Mylan acquired it nine years ago.

Mylan’s EpiPen price increases mean that some people simply cannot afford to buy the protection. They are left to take their chances. Meanwhile, Mylan’s chief, Heather Bresch, 47, received $19 million in compensation last year for doing such a great job.

She is unapologetic about the outrageous price increases on a drug and delivery device that many people need to save their lives.

“I am running a business,” she told The New York Times. “I am a for-profit business. I am not hiding from that.”

Ms. Bresch has experience with controversy.  A report by the University of West Virginia said she was awarded a business degree, 10 years after attending classes and without completing the course work because her father was West Virginia’s governor. He now is a senator.

Senator and daughter might get to meet face to face in Congress. A special  Senate committee has called on Mylan to appear before it to explain the price increases.

Mylan also has angered some Washington politicians for moving its headquarters to the Netherlands in 2014, a move that reduced its tax rate and prevented a takeover that its investors had favoured.

The company will not say how much it makes off EpiPen but sales of the pen exceed $1 billion.

Meanwhile, if you want to keep wasps at bay, try this: Mix one cup of hand soap with 20 drops of peppermint oil. Top up with water and put in a spray bottle. Spray in areas wasps frequent.

Email: shaman@vianet.ca
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Yellow Jackets and Health Care

It was plenty late arriving but Sunday’s first hard frost fell from the sky like George Bush’s shock and awe campaign in Iraq. It hit fast and hard and completed autumn’s Job One.

Job One in autumn is putting to sleep every yellow jacket in the county. Jack Frost got it done Sunday. He knocked all the wasps onto their backs, frostbitten stingers pointed skyward. Deader than the falling leaves.

So that’s it for another stinging insect season. The one just past was particularly nasty, starting early and lasting longer with wasps seriously aggressive in September and the first half of October.

Wasps are especially noticeable – and especially aggressive – in the fall because they are on vacation. Spring and summer they toil non-stop gathering food for their colony’s young. In late summer and early fall the queen wasps stop laying eggs and the workers are free to go about looking for carbohydrates and sweets, such as rotting fruit, to feed themselves.

More free time to roam usually means more encounters with humans. When they sting they don’t leave behind the stinger, therefore one wasp can sting multiple times.

I had two wasp encounters this fall. The second encounter, on Thanksgiving Weekend, landed me in a hospital emergency room. Two stings from a lone wasp left me looking like Pumpkinhead, my eyes swollen almost shut.

Three little bags of intravenous cocktails started to put me back in shape. No real damage done but it was a good reminder how dangerous these critters can be. And, another reminder of the contradictions in our health care system.

Allergic reactions to wasp stings can kill. Deaths from wasp stings are rare in Canada but anyone spending a lot of time outside, especially in the fall, is wise to carry a couple of antihistamine tablets. They will slow down an allergic reaction, if you happen to develop one.

Allergic reactions occur sometimes even if you have been stung before and have not reacted. Also, wasp stings can react with some medications, like blood pressure pills.

Going to hospital because of a wasp sting had a positive side. Once again I got to see the dedication and professionalism of medical staff who perform miracles in spite of the cancerous government bureaucracies that control their work.

The growth of health care bureaucracies is shocking and people need to rise up and demand a stop to it. Ontario has 14 Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) each with a CEO earning an average annual salary of close to $300,000. Then there are the COOs, CFOs, Chief Communications Officers and on and on.

Search the Internet for LHIN salaries and you’ll find eight screens of the names of LHIN employees earning the big bucks. Big buck acronyms sucking up dollars that should go into direct care for patients.

Ditto the 14 Community Care Access Centres (CCACs), which govern home care. 

Executive salaries in these questionable bureaucracies have been soaring. Meanwhile, the salaries of people who do the real work helping patients have fallen behind.

Bob Hepburn, a Toronto Star staffer, reported last year that only 40 to 50 cents of every tax dollar earmarked for home care actually reaches the health-care professionals who deliver services to patients. Guess where the rest goes? Executive salaries, administrative costs and corporate profits.

Meanwhile, back in the bush the frost has killed all the worker wasps but the queens have survived. They will hibernate below ground until spring when they will establish new colonies, build new nests and the cycle will begin again.

There is no such cycle in the health care system. The real workers survive the bureaucratic hard frosts and continue to help people with their afflictions.

Their big buck bureaucratic bosses, however, do not get to hibernate like the queen wasps. They continue to shuffle paper, improve their media relations and lobby politicians for more money and more power.

Wasp stings can be neutralized by drugs. Too bad there is not a drug to relieve taxpayers from the pain and swelling of health care bureaucracies.

Email: shaman@vianet.ca
Profile: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K8FY3Y