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editorial

Scapegoats should never take the place of safety standards

A lot of people are dead because some things that should not have happened did happen. Poisons were mixed into medicines, almost certainly by negligence and not design. A bus caught fire, maybe in part due to a mechanic's reckless shortcut, but there was a shocking death toll in large part due to some outrageously unsafe design flaws.

However, the Torrijos administration, like prior ones, seems content to assign blame to someone outside the circle of wealth and power regardless of what the facts warrant and avoid some fundamental policy changes that the recent tragedies indicate are needed.

It seems that a bus mechanic bypassed a fuse box, which allegedly caused a short-circuit that led to the deadly bus fire. If, after a fair hearing and due process of law, that's properly found to be the truth, the man recklessly disregarded a safety standard about which he knew or should have known and it's appropriate that he should be penalized for that.

But this bus had an air conditioning system that used a flammable coolant, which is what caught fire. How can it be that buses loaded with such chemicals are allowed to carry passengers?

When the fire started, people stampeded toward the back of the bus, thinking that there was an emergency exit there. There wasn't --- not there or anywhere else. How can it be that buses without emergency exits are allowed to carry passengers?

This particular bus was purchased with a loan from the Banco Nacional de Panama, a state-owned bank. How can it be that the Panamanian government loans money to create public health hazards like this one?

Yes, the bus syndicates are often mafias, and the driver of this particular bus was a scofflaw with 92 tickets who should have been taken off the road long ago, and too many of the buses upon which Panamanians depend to get to and from work are poorly maintained.

All of these issues need to be addressed, but can't be adequately addressed in big crackdowns after some particularly gruesome event. What's most important is not that the government appears to be doing something in a crisis, but a quotidian adjustment in the ways things are done so that we don't have so many crises in the first place.

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Meanwhile over at Seguro Social, all sorts of spins are being imparted on what happened but several things with which the arrested dignitaries of a chemical importing company had nothing to do are the most salient features of the case:

1.      Neither the proper storage rotation of raw materials to go into medicines nor the proper testing of these ingredients before their use were practiced;

2.      Just from a cursory examination of the outside, the lab where the Social Security Fund was making medicine is a disaster, with all of the necessary conditions for the feeding and nesting of rats, which is in fact going on there. We did not have anybody in authority who saw fit to make a personal inspection and let it be known that the situation was disgraceful and order that the mess be cleaned immediately;

3.      The highly politicized and repressive labor relations situation within Seguro Social have prevented doctors and other health care workers from advocating for the best interests of their patients, and this terrified silence permitted a political cover-up of the health crisis for that lasted for many weeks and surely contributed to the death toll.

The president has, before investigations were even close to complete, announced that the Seguro Social director and health minister will keep their jobs no matter what. Meanwhile some paper directors and a lawyer who had nothing to do with running the company that imported the problem glycerine were arrested. One of the jailed individuals runs a little fonda, and thus turns out to be the perfect obscure patsy for when people in high places have neglected their administrative duties with tragic results.

There are facts yet to be determined in the poisoned medicines case, and there are sordid realities that have been uncovered in the whole affair that may not be connected with the deaths but still need to be corrected. What we are likely to find at the ultimate bottom line is that people died because of inexcusable negligence, and afterwards there was an ugly and very deliberate attempt to cover the tracks of responsibility. Those responsible for both the deaths and the cover-up ought to be penalized for what they did.

But here, too, the assessment of blame is not the most important thing. What's most important is that our public health care system raise its quality standards. It's hard to make that happen when Panama's political culture has it that a government job is a political reward or a personal possession. More than anything else, a government job is a duty to serve the public and when that ethic becomes an endangered species in an institution like Seguro Social it puts lives in danger.

Let's have justice, including the punishment of wrongdoers. But let's not accept that as a substitute for higher public safety standards.

Bear in mind...

I'm furious about the Women's Liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming that women are brighter than men. That's true, but it should be kept quiet or it ruins the whole racket.

Anita Loos

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

Winston Churchill

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.

Helen Keller