Targeting Resources. Hospital rolls out new diagnostic tool.

The largest hospital in the South West region, Derriford at Plymouth, yesterday announced it was pioneering a new technology in the fight against MRSA (methicillin resistant staph. aureus)

Using a minute sample of DNA, this piece of diagnostic kit would be able to screen patients on arrival for the MRSA bug, enabling the hospital to 'target its resources' and treat / isolate carriers prior to invasive surgery. Doctors explained that the technology now allowed them to diagnose MRSA with this in-house machine "in under 3 hours, rather than submit samples to a laboratory and wait for up to 5 days for a result."

The catch phrase, we feel is 'target resources'.

"Resouces". That's money to you and me - in fact it's our money. Governments don't have any, the Treasury counts and redistributes its beans - but makes none. It's ours. So anything that 'targets' those precious and scarce 'recourses' must be welcomed.

And here we return to the post 2005 - A good Idea (on this site) which describes Enigma Diagnostics' new diagnostic tool the PCR cycler. This relies on DNA material from a subject (urine, sputum, pus etc.) to diagnose specific bacteria (micobacterium bovis?) on site in less than 30 minutes.

It would be a brave soul, faced with a positive sample of bovine Tb (micobacterium bovis) from a grossly infected badger sett, who would deny a 'targeted' elimination of a highly infectious source of this pernicious, deadly zoonosis. That is 'targeting resources', rather than an extermination policy, widely and wildly postulated by John Bourne and his cohorts on the ISG, as a reason for keeping the Krebs' debacle going.


"The NFBG are not against culling infectious badgers". said Pauline Kidner (see post below)

Really?

Now they can prove that - to Defra, the Treasury, ecologists, ramblers, and not least cattle keepers and the badgers themselves.