HOW TO KILL AN AMERICAN FAMILY PART No.

3
THE SEMMELWEIS EFFECT
Ignaz Semmelweis was born in1818. He became a physician in the Maternity Department in the Vienna Lying-in Hospital. This was before the theory of germ caused diseases was developed. There were two maternity wards at the hospital and one of them had a horrendously high death rate among the women giving births. They were dying of what was then called puerperal fever. One day a friend of Semmelweis, Dr. Jacob Kolletschka cut his finger during a surgical operation. Within a few days he died looking similar to the women who died after childbirth. Semmelweis concluded that something may have been transferred from the patient to the doctor. In time he concluded that a primary cause of the high death rate in the one ward was because prior to attending the women in the high death rate ward, the interns were dissecting cadavers in the morgue. At the time there was no requirement to wash their hands after dissecting cadavers before helping with the birthing. Semmelweis concluded that the students were carrying some kind of cadaveric material from the morgue to the maternity ward. So he introduced a very rigid hand washing procedure and insisted the students follow his procedures. The death rate in the deadly ward plummeted and in fact fell well below the death rate in the safer ward. However, before long poor Semmelweis ran into a lot of trouble. First, his fellow doctors became annoyed with this tedious hand washing and antiseptic procedures. But even more upsetting to his associates was the idea that Semmelweis was concluding that they, the doctors, were part of the problem. That was an insulting and intolerable idea. Almost half the patients undergoing major surgery also were dying from infections. To imply that the doctors were the basic cause of the deaths was beyond forgiving. Semmelweis became a pariah of the profession. He was relieved of his position at the hospital. Semmelweis spent the next 14 years promoting his ideas and seeking acceptance. He wrote a book on the subject in 1861. But his associates believed that he had betrayed his fellow medical professionals. There would be no forgiveness. The medical experts kept right on killing a high percentage of those they presumably were protecting. He suffered mentally and financially with the rejections. Also, the knowledge that thousands of people were dying needlessly and he was unable to stop it had a terrible effect. Finally he had a breakdown and was admitted to an insane asylum. Later day medical pioneers, such as Lister and Pasteur, were celebrated. Semmelweis has been consigned to the third sub-basement of the pioneers of the medical profession.

AN INCREDIBLE STORY THE SOLUTION TO FIRE DEATHS IS DEVELOPED AND PROVEN BUT THE FIRE ESTABLISHMENT FIGHTS THE SOLUTION
SEVENTY YEARS OF THE DELIBERATE BURNING OF AMERICA During 1896 the fire insurance industry created the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). The profits of the fire insurers depended on huge cash flow through the insuring system that an extremely high burn rate would produce. To be certain that the burn rate would remain high the NFPA created a fire code that essentially banned the use of the sprinkler system to protect lives. The code made the sprinkler system a property protection system for major industrial plants only. As a result only a tiny percent of the buildings where life was most seriously at risk were sprinkler protected. Because the fire sprinkler system put water on the early fire before the fire grew large the fire death rate within sprinklered buildings was very close to zero. (The explanations are provided in Part1of this report.) Although a class of engineers called Fire Protection Engineers was created by the fire insurers during 1903, these engineers were trained to engineer on the basis of the NFPA created fire codes This included the fire sprinkler code that essentially banned sprinklers in the following type buildings: Residences, multiple family homes, schools, universities, motels, hotels, nursing homes, hospitals, restaurants, bars, night clubs, dance halls, theatres, meeting halls, etc. This code developed ban resulted in probably 98 to 99 percent of all such properties being constructed devoid of sprinklers from 1896 until well into the 1960s (when I began to protect these building types with the economical and better engineered sprinkler system I called the Life Safety System). The efforts of the regulatory system to destroy my businesses and to prevent the modernization of the fire protection system are perhaps the greatest untold story of the 20th century. As explained in Part 1 the cost in lives and injuries of the dishonesty within the fire code system may have produced more than a million fire deaths and injuries. Below I provide reports of the solutions to fire that I developed and I also report on some of the many efforts to prevent the solutions from being applied (because that would reduce the profits from fire and could also reduce the number of fire stations and firefighters.)