No Stone Left Unturned

November 2004

Monday, November 1, 2004, 9:02am

Between puffy cotton candy clouds the post-eclipse moon hovers without noticeable reflection in the wind-blown waters of Farm Pond. I contemplate how the 8:07am train out of Ashland never showed up this morning. Now, this last train of the morning commute – the 8:45 – is also 10 minutes late and just when I should be arriving in Boston we’re rolling to a stop at Framingham Station.

Judging by the Zone 8 rail passes lingering on the seat backs since Worcester, no conductor has come by to collect tickets or take money. Free rides on the house today I suppose – except to those of us with prepaid passes.

By Natick, the clouds are gone, and the moon instead hovers above a churning Lake Cochituate. Ahead of us, the 8:30am local cleanly sweeps forlorn passengers waiting for the train that never arrived. Through Natick perhaps only two passengers have boarded since I found my own seat. Our stops are brief and instead of collecting the usual crowds, we are a ghost train of the damned always on-route but never seeming to arrive. By Wellesley Square I still haven’t seen a conductor, and for all I know they’re huddled up inside the locomotive at the back of the train.

While lingering at Ashland Station for the train this morning I pulled out my walkman style radio. A lengthy news account was describing the shortage of flu shots this year and the hand-wringing over losing half of the expect supply. Evidently one of the suppliers has been disqualified because of a production mishap and as a result they won’t be shipping their portion.

According to the report, conventional wisdom is to first vaccinate those most ‘at-risk’ – the old and those with respiratory and other compromising situations. But one story in this segment concerns an experiment in Texas where a large portion of school children were immunized – not because they can’t easily survive the virus, but because children tend to spread the flu most rapidly and the hypothesis is along the lines of breaking the initial outbreak.

Apparently in the late 1950s the Japanese had a major flu epidemic and for several decades thereafter all school children were immunized with favorable results until the program was abandoned in favor of the lower cost at-risk-only model. According to health statistics, wintertime flu mortality increased sharply in 1994 – the first year children were no longer vaccinated.

By way of purely statistical analysis it should be alarming to note how by a wide margin more US residents have been killed by influenza than in all the wars we have fought, and yet we spend roughly a thousand times more on military defense than we spend to maintain a viable supply of flu vaccine – something on the order of two dollars per person per year versus two thousand to maintain our military capacity.

I’m not suggesting that we should have no national defense or even less of it. I am simply noticing a severe disconnect between the threats we actually face in our daily lives and how resources are allocated to make our lives genuinely safer. So perhaps the time has come to make brief foray to find out why.

Making for the sea we’re pulling out of Back Bay Station back into streaming sunlight with its angular shadows heading further east. In case the train pauses near the latest examples of ‘GO SOX’ graffiti I have my camera at hand. But alas, we’re so late there is no traffic delay upon entering South Station, and we’re just rolling nonstop right to our platform terminus without any hope for decent photography.