Showing posts with label Lord Kelvin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lord Kelvin. Show all posts

Sunday, May 11, 2014

Meager and unsatisfactory

It’s nice to see antimicrobial resistance featured in a Sunday NY Times editorial—nothing that we haven’t already covered in Eli’s recent post on the WHO report, but worth reading nonetheless. 

If you believe that “you can’t improve what you can’t measure”*, the most disheartening sentence in this editorial about the WHO report is “…few countries track and monitor antibiotic resistance comprehensively, and there is no standard methodology for doing so."

*This saying is a paraphrase of Lord Kelvin, who also said:
“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.” 
“Meager and unsatisfactory” is a great description of the status of our current response to the antimicrobial resistance threat.

OSHA! OSHA! OSHA!

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