Autumn is here running as it does from mid-September to mid-December. It is a lovely season offering in many places the best weather and in others the colorful and passionate death throes of leaves. It is also, however, the flu season - that time of year when warnings proliferate and reminders to wash hands abound. This year is no different. And while I have written my local tv station to suggest they also advise people to avoid touching things, its staff of newscasters persists with the rest, fluids and washing of hands advice. It won’t even consider advising people to cut down on the number of things they touch. To me it seems to link so obviously with the hands washing that the reluctance is hard to understand.

The other matter I find hard to understand is the focus on swine flu or H1N1 as some prefer. Of course it is and should be a concern. We do have a vaccine, but even so those in the know anticipate some loss of life from the virus. So, some attention to the matter is warranted. But hardly any attention is paid to a much larger threat to our health. Indeed, until it was brought to my attention in an advertisement produced by the Republican Party, an organization long known for its deep concern for the nation’s health, I myself was unaware of it. And, I must confess, I had to look the word up to better determine if frequent washing of hands, rest and fluids would help. As is occasionally the case, the Republican Party was able to indentify the threat without being able to suggest a treatment. And while this failing has a tendency to produce a generalized fear and varying degrees of paranoia, forewarned is … well, forewarned.

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I was unable to find a definition of the word that included disease, virus or, indeed, illness. It’s an old word. Been around since the mid-19^th century and that may explain why the definition didn’t include the word virus. I don’t think they knew about viruses back then. But they certainly knew about diseases and illnesses and so I was surprised not to find any reference to them. I considered that it might just be an old word put to new use and that dictionaries might not have caught up with the new usage. Those Republicans are known to be pretty much out there on the cutting edge. And I haven’t entirely rejected that possibility. What I did get was the following: “[B]ureaucrat |ˈbyoŏrəˌkrat|. Noun. An official in a government department. An administrator concerned with procedural correctness at the expense of people's needs.”

I believe the Republicans deserve a lot of credit for having identified this new threat and since no one else appears to have stepped forward to give the danger a name I myself have chosen to name it. I call it the R1B1. That’s it. Just R1B1. The R is for Republican. The B is for bureaucrat. I put the “1s” in just to give it a little scientific zing.

I noted that the Republicans had not proposed any treatment for R1B1, but that is not entirely fair. They have suggested that something along the lines of a quarantine would be effective. R1B1 carriers would be isolated and kept entirely out of the health care system. Or, as they put it, the health care system would have “no government bureaucrats.” Evidently, what Republican researchers think may happen is that R1B1 will invade the space between a patient and a physician and disable the physician’s ability to make decisions or give advice. The patient now bereft of direction will fall prey to R1B1’s penchant for procedural correctness and, well, you can guess the rest. Patients will begin aimlessly wandering the streets and fall prey to other R1B1 carriers and further episodes of procedural correctness.

It does appear from the definition of the word “bureaucrat” unnecessary to call bureaucrats “government bureaucrats” since a bureaucrat is “an official in a government department”. Calling them government bureaucrats would appear redundant and incline one to believe that there are other bureaucrats who do not work for the government. But I suppose we should take the Republicans at their word and assume for the moment that there are bureaucrats otherwise employed. These we may refer to as R1BX. Apparently – this has not been entirely explained by the Republicans – carriers of R1BX can be effectively dealt with through recently developed treatments. After something like 40 years of research a cure for “pre-existing condition rejection” and “high cost” have been developed by researchers, presumably Republican researchers. This new cure addresses the main effects of R1BX. The mechanism by which the new cure addresses “pre-existing condition rejection” is pretty straightforward. It is not entirely clear how it addresses “high cost”. Suffice it to say that before development of the cure R1BX invaded the space between the patient and the doctor in much the same way it is predicted R1B1 might. To the extent R1BX was more benign it appeared to result from fewer patients even getting in the same room with the doctor and, thus, fewer patients left to wander the streets as a result of the disease itself. Plenty were left to wander the streets with an actual illness, but not as a direct result of R1BX.

Although no mention is made one way or the other, I am assuming it is not anticipated that R1BX will mutate. But it is worth remembering that the “pre-existing condition rejection” effect was a mutation which it took forty years to bring under control and which evidenced not so much “procedural correctness at the expense of people's needs” as “profit at the expense of people’s needs.”

Perhaps the warnings about the dangers of “concern about procedural correctness” ought to be accompanied by warnings about “concern for profit.”

Well, as I say, it’s autumn and it looks like we’re in for a rough flu season no matter what. We already have H1N1 and now we’ll either get R1B1 or R1BX. Frankly, I’ll take the R1B1. We’ve had the R1BX around for quite awhile and the little devil always seems to find a way around our cures. It is, I suppose, a tribute to the profit motive that it always seems to find a way. R1B1 seems to have been effectively controlled by Medicare and Medicaid, but I hate to think the Republicans would issue a false health warning just as the flu season was getting started. I’m sure they must know something the rest of us don’t. I can’t wait until they decide to let us know preferably with re-enactments of health care horror stories. Those are my favorites and besides I think really important national issues should in general be decided on the combined basis of anecdotes and vague fears.