Pepper spray exposure forces closure of hospital ER

From The Standard:

St. Catharines General Hospital emergency room was shut down late Sunday night and ambulances were diverted to other hospitals when a man arrived after having been exposed to a large amount of pepper spray.

The pepper spray was so noxious, eight staff members and six patients in the department reported suffering symptoms of the inflammatory agent. One nurse, who directly treated the man and had no time to don protective gear, had to be given first aid, said Anne Atkinson, the Niagara Health System’s vice-president patient services.

“It was a significant amount (of pepper spray) and staff and other patients had burning of the eyes,” she said, adding others experienced throat irritation.

“We asked to go on ambulance re-direct and that provided staff with the time to safely manage that patient and decontamination.”

The Atlantic: Doctors make up the largest percentage of “the 1%”

From the Atlantic Wire:

If the Occupy Wall Street protests are aiming to take down the “1 percent” of Americans who control the increasingly largest chunk of our nation’s wealth, perhaps they need to redirect their efforts to somewhere other than Wall Street.

According to Nicole Lapin of CNN, financial services professionals make up just 14 percent of that top 1 percent of wage earners. Their average salary of $311,000 per year, while quite gaudy, falls just below the threshold needed to break into the highest-earning subset.

The biggest single group of professionals in the top one percent is actually doctors, who make up 16 percent of that subset. That must have made things awkward yesterday when doctors and nurses joined the masses in Zuccotti Park to call for more health care reform. (Executives and managers outside of finance make up 31% of the total, but Lapin didn’t break them down by industry.)