¶ You have to wonder why and how a state-run facility for the mentally and physically disabled could take the name “O D Heck” — no matter how admirable Oswald Heck might have been as a person. Danny Hakim’s report on the sad state of affairs at the Heck Developmental Center, and elsewhere in New York State’s 23,000-staffed Office for People With Developmental Difficulties, makes for tough morning reading. Unfortunately, it fails to confront what it hints at: facilities of this kind do not attract anything like the required number of qualified workers, and probably never will. You have only to read about the demoralization of unqualified workers to see why. It is clear that officials at every level have salved their consciences by throwing money at insitutions like O D Heck, and then strenuously looking the other way. The viability of actual reform is anything but clear. ¶ The real story about the awful outbreak of E coli in Germany (22 dead; more than 600 in intensive care) exploded over the weekend with the profoundly unsurprising news that locally-grown sprouts, and not Spanish cucumbers, might have been the epidemic’s vector. What’s surprising, of course, is that this wasn’t surmised from the get-go, since sprouts are at the top of the epidemiologist’s checklist — and they’re rarely shipped long distances. Calls for Germany to indemnify Spanish farmers for the loss of ripe vegetables make a lot of sense, at least at this point in the story.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, June 6th, 2011 at 10:30 am.