Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is not the type of person who sees a doctor for every little ache, pain, or sniffle he gets. Frankly, none of his immediate family are that type. In a way, people who do see a doctor for every single little ache, pain, or sniffle they get annoy your Maximum Leader. They annoy him for a number of reasons.

Allow him to ennumerate them.

First, if you happen to have health insurance through some group (like your employer) those are the people that drive up the group rates. If you’ve never thought of it your Maximum Leader is here to make you think of it. Organizations are charged their premiums based, in part, on usage. More usage means higher premiums. Many organizations do a 60/40 split of health care premiums. (Meaning the organization pays 60% of the premium, the insured person(s) pay 40%.) That added chunk of your income that goes to health insurance every year if you are part of a group plan is dramatically affected by others in your group going to the doctor. Your Maximum Leader was once very familiar with an organization that had one health plan for the whole organizatin - except one branch office. That one branch office had a separate plan. Why? Because the one branch office, before it was split off, accounted for 25% of annual spending on healthcare across the whole company. Crazy…

Anyhow…

The second reason is that many people who visit the doctor for every single ache, pain, and sniffle they get are ignorant of basic medical facts and thus insist on receiving a precription for SOMETHING before they go. Now most Doctors are sensible and will refuse silly requests. But there are plenty of doctors who are, in some ways, just as ignorant as their patients and thus WILL prescribe SOMETHING to someone who needs NOTHING.

You see, much of what ails us is viral. Viral things, as they are not bacterial things, are not treated by antibiotics. But when people suffering from viral things are given antibiotics the result is often times bateria growing stronger and resisting antibiotics. Frankly, when you are suffering from some bacterial ailment and do not complete the prescribed regimen of antibiotics you are likely contributing to the problem of bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics.

Thus we come to the issue of streptococcus suis. Streptococcus suis is a pig-borne bacteria. Under normal conditions it can be killed by penicillin. Of course, under normal conditions you would only find this strep strain in pigs.

That is unless you happen to find the streptococcus suis in Asia. In which case you now find streptococcus suis has mutated, jumped over to people; and now rather than being treatable by penicillin, it laughs at your puny antibiotics and kills you.

Of all the things in this world that your Maximum Leader thinks have the potential to do in most (if not all) of humanity the killer bacteria is the one that both scares and annoys him most.

It scares him because with every stupidly prescribed antibiotic given to a complete waste of DNA is a little baby step towards the mutated bacteria that will one day kill the masses of humanity that don’t have near-perfect immune systems.

Your Maximum Leader had a great-Aunt who died in the Influenza Epidemic of 1918. He knows this because his grandmother told him that her sister died of influenza on Christmas Day 1918. (And thereafter, Christmas Day was never celebrated by her family.) The potential for a pandemic many times worse than the Influenza Epidemic of 1918 grows greater with each passing day. In 1918 the mortality rate from influenza was 2.5%. Check out that mortality rate from the pig article. You read that correctly 20%.

Let’s see. The population of the world is roughly what? 6 billion people. 20% of 6 billion is roughly 1.2 billion people. The population of the United States is roughly 300 million people. Humm.. That is an unsettling prospect.

(Excursus: Your Maximum Leader started adding the populations of all of the countries in North America together to see how close he would come to 1.2 billion. Let us just say he started working on South America to get his number…)

The fact that this pandemic could be coming annoys your Maximum Leader because in so many ways it is completely avoidable.

But hey… If the pandemic comes and kills at least 20% of humanity think of how it will help the environment…

Carry on.