Blatherskite

Foolish gibberish

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I am a Children’s Librarian living in the Portland, Oregon area. When I am not Children’s Librianing I like to play with cameras and film. I also like playing the ukulele, knitting, sketching, and hiking.

More things they don’t teach you in library school

Let me start this off by saying that the library in which I work is a downtown, city-center branch and we have quite a large amount of homeless people who come in and use our library. I assume that this is common in many public libraries. The library welcomes everyone in the community to use it.

Okay, so yesterday my colleague tells me that when one of the regular guys that plants himself at the listening station for half the day gives her the headphones that he borrowed back to her, another patron comes up to her and says, “you better wash those headphones with alcohol when people are done with them or someone is going to get tuberculosis.” TUBERCULOSIS. And I’m handling these things, and more all day.

yikes.

And that reminded me of the time at a staff meeting not long ago another colleague, who was reporting on a health workshop that she had gone to, had mentioned that staph infection is rampant among the homeless community right now, and that includes the flesh-eating kind. FLESH EATING.

I think there are some latent germ phobias within me coming to the surface…

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4 responses to “More things they don’t teach you in library school”

  1. Christie Avatar
    Christie

    All I can say is SANITARY WIPES and ANTI BACTERIAL HAND SANITIZER. How scary. And please, please, please, get out of the habit of touching your face during the day. That’s probably the best thing to do.

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  2. ManDrake Avatar
    ManDrake

    I don’t know a polite or comforting way to tell you this, but there is no way you can protect yourself from TB by cleaning anything. It’s an airborne disease that has developed antibiotic resistance because of the homeless and illegal aliens. In Southwestern states, the EMT and Police/Firefighters all have caught it from doing their jobs around these groups. It’s airborne and has a 22% infection rate according to Wiki. Prolonged exposure is dangerous business. They are working on vaccines, if you are going to be exposed longer term you need to start thinking about getting more information from the local health department. At least get treatment for people that are thought to have it. It’s really bad news in a life time of pain and suffering kind of way.

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  3. Moni Avatar
    Moni

    ugh. That IS somenthing they should teach in library school. I hope this doesn’t sound too harsh, but if I had known before that I would have been exposed to this kind of thing I might have reconsidered working in a public library. It’s really sad because I find lots of satisfaction working for the public, too.

    And I am kind of temped to blame this on Republicans, in a way. Because Democrats think about issues like Healthcare for everyone. If everyone had access to proper healthcare I wouldn’t have to even worry about this.

    Thank goodness i am moving to another branch next week! it’s a neighboorhood branch and, I’m told, this kind of thing is not an issue there.

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  4. ManDrake Avatar
    ManDrake

    Well it’s really only been recently that they figured out that it could happen. Like in the last 10 years or so. It used to be believed that you have to live in the house with someone with TB to get it transmitted by long term contact. Then larger than expected cases in the medical and emergency personal kept getting it along to the border. They discovered that it was a function of not only long term exposure, but repeated small exposures had the same effect. Also we used to treat it differently as well. We didn’t force people into quarantine unless they finished their antibiotic treatment. That’s another Republican thing, personal freedom is more important than public health. People were allowed to do enough antibiotics that they could afford or remember to take. And people slowly made antibiotic resistant strains and then those have slowly started becoming the norm.

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