Swine Flu

  Bed Bugs

 Diseases
Going to  Hell  Lightning Global warming
 Magick  Cloning Disasters
 

  There are so many things to worry about in this world that it's our recommendation that you don't worry about anything! Whatever worrying you do would hardly be a drop in the bucket of possibilities! An old Woody Allen movie showed the Woody character getting a reprieve from his doctor, after worrying that he had a brain tumor.
  Woody skips out of the doctor's office and runs ecstatically down the streets of Manhattan. Suddenly he stops dead in his tracks. Oh-mi-god! It'll happen anyway! Maybe 20 or 40 years from now, but there still awaits that Grim Reaper!
  Now, if you refuse to take our advice and insist on worrying about something, go ahead and select a couple of things from the following list. If one of the worries that you choose doesn't materialize, don't worry! A new worry will automatically crop up to replace it.
  Prefer to worry about the Big Things? Try nuclear extinction or global warming. More countries are going nuclear than ever before Iran? Building a missile defense shield? Not building a missile defense shield? With some worries, it's best to choose a side to worry about. Please consider choosing a genetics-type of worry. Cloning people? Intra-species cloning? Genetic mutations? Perhaps, just genetics in general. If you're more of an environmental influence type, epigenetic might be a good worry, how environment can have a (malign) impact on the expression of your genes....Then, there are medical worries. If you're in perfect health, you might want to worry about a heart attack out of the blue....We've all heard about that poor woman that had the wrong embryo implanted in her!.....Do you like claustrophobia? You can worry that, any time you get on an elevator, it might get stuck for hours and hours. This could happen when you have a crucial business meeting, a career-affecting meeting. Someone the elevator might even have halitosis....You might want to start with little everyday worries, nothing that has actually happened yet but the potential is there. Your psychiatrist retiring. Or your hairdresser. A small fender bender and someone threatening to sue. Your car insurance going up $$$. Your health insurance going up$$$ if you're lucky enough to have any....This leads us to little economic worries. Candy bars are getting smaller. Purchase a lb. Of coffee lately? Since when is l2 or l0 oz. A pound? On a larger scale, there's the economy itself. Should you spend lots of $$$ to try to help the poor sick economy$ Or should you buy almost nothing, on the premise that it's better to help pull the whole sick system down? Whatever you decide to worry about, it's best to choose your worrying times. Two 2am to 5 am are advantageous, based on the finding that those who chronically lack sleep are more susceptible to catching germs. The following list has been updated, lest you think that getting the plague can't happen in the 21st Century CE!

 

  SWINE FLU!!!! I'm glad somebody flew. The rest of us are scared to death to get on a plane!
  Being of a pessimistic bent, I have always thought that another pandemic might come along to help us solve the problem of overpopulation. After all, this has been the pattern through the ages!
  Plague, the Black Death, had been lapping around the banks of the Thames since 1348, but in 1665 it struck mightily. The writer who said it decimated at city of London --is wrong. Decimate means to kill one out of every ten. In point of fact, London lost 20% of its population.
  Okay, we in the "overdeveloped" countries do not have the garbage strewn, dung dropped, spittle spewed narrow warrens of misery that were London's streets of 1665. Not that such streets can't be found! But we do have a world where, if someone gets sick in Los Angeles, it could eventually affect a man walking down a road in China. We have airplanes. Just as the world economy is all tangled up together, (The housing market mess in the U. S. can mess up the whole financial structure of , say, Iceland.) health problems are also tangled up.( I know that no one has problems anymore, they just have "issues" but I'll stick to the antiquated usage.)
  Now we're looking at SWINE FLU! I remember the swine flu scare of 1976. Nothing much happened.Not too many people contracted the flu itself but large numbers of people did run out to get the vaccine. Some who got the vaccine still live with the side affects of the nasty neurological disorder, Guillain-Barre Syndrome.
  The last big pandemic, the misnamed 1918-1919 Spanish flu, killed 50,000,000 people. This flu might have made its debut in the US of A, with fresh World War 1 recruits camped in Kansas. Many of these soldiers hailed from farming country, with limited exposure to such germ cauldrons as a Manhattan subway or the British Tube. Their healthy backgrounds made them ripe for the picking. Curiously fewer older people got taken down by the Spanish flu. Epidemiologists had a theory that a less deadly strain had wafted through the world around the l850's, granting some immunity to the aged.The 1918 flu was a H1N1 flu.
  This new Swine Flu is also H1N1, but seems to have mutated in an insidious way. Formerly, transmission of this flu subtype from pigs to humans almost never happened. With the rare cases recorded since the mid-20th Century, the victims were thought to have a close association with pigs. Pigs are very agreeable hosts for several flu strains.. They can be infected with influenza strains that usually infect not just pigs but also birds and humans. This is an easy way to get a virus mutation. Moreover, viruses are RNA, not DNA. RNA is much less stable. It mutates easily. It is a giant step when a virus can pass from one species to another, e.g. from pigs to humans. It is a humongous step when it can pass from human to human.
  Remember--a virus has one aim and only one aim: to replicate itself! 
  Bedbugs making a comeback!
 In September 2009, New York papers delivered the hardly surprising news that bedbugs had forced the temporary closing of a building at John Jay College. The bugs were detected using special bug-sniffing dogs. (I've known of bodies being found through cadaver dogs, but had not yet learned of bug dogs!)
  The college's plight is nothing out of the ordinary, because recently these little blood suckers (typical size 0.2" or 0.5 cm) have made a huge comeback!  It's helped them that DDT has fallen out of favor.
  The bugs have 6 legs. They lie low during the day. By night, they are literal vampires. They have  two very unique properties:  http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/bedbugs/DS00663
  They inject an anticoagulant so they can keep the blood flowing. They also use a numbing agent so they won't disturb you while they're feasting, since they don't want you to wake up and disturb them. They usually cause small itchy red bumps, but if you're allergic they can cause large itchy wheals. They're not too fussy. Blood from dogs, cats, cows, birds, people and bats are acceptable. (Any blood type: A, O, B, AB, - or + okay). In addition to beds, they can do trains, planes, cushy theater seats. Like most insects, they thrive in the tropics, but they do travel. We travel too. That's the problem. And we might have more in our luggage than our clothes. Sweet dreams Sleep tight! Don't let the bedbugs bite!
 
 

 Most religious folks that I know have little doubt that they will go to heaven when they die. The mainstream churches talk up a pretty good case about heaven! But what about.....HELL! Hell has been shamefully watered down in 21st Century theology. 
 *Purgatory* has just about been purged from the Catholic lexicon. When I was younger, I used to take great solace from the idea of Purgatory. I knew full well that I wasn't good enough to ascend right into Heaven, like the Virgin Mary, with my shoes on. Purgatory, I could handle. Doing Purgatory wouldn't be any harder than doing jail time. Shamefully, the Encyclopaedia of Catholicism only runs a half-page on Purgatory. "As its core, the doctrine affirms simply a transitional spiritual state ((possibly instantaneous and coincident with death)) of transformation in view of the assured prospect of the Beatific Vision." That's pretty lame. So it must be either Heaven or Hell! 
If you're a Catholic, you could always die in a state of Mortal Sin. Many years back, I was in Dublin. On Sunday, churches used to run Masses all day long. Outside St. Mary's Pro-Cathedral, a couple dozen vagrant-types were hanging out, trying to shake you down for a bit of silver before you went into church and threw everything in the collection plate. But at a certain point in the Mass, the guys from outside came filing into the last couple of pews in the church. Later, they all left early. They had it down pat! In order for the Mass to count, one has to be present for 3 parts: the offertory, the consecration and the communion. If one missed any of those 3 parts, one missed Mass. That was a mortal sin. If any of these fellows had got their timing mixed up, left too soon, then got struck dead by a car outside on Marlborough Street, they would go to HELL. 
Evangelical types of Christians, so-called, swear on their bibles that: other Protestants, Jews, Episcopalians, Atheists, Unitarians, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jains, Scientologists, Anthroposcopists, Quakers, Ethical Culturalists, Pagans, Wiccans. Santerios-well, anybody but an Evangelical Reborn Christian---will surely go to Hell. 
 

 Anyone could go there. Anyone still can. Temptations lie everywhere, even within your own body. "Self-abuse." Deliberately calling a line wrong in tennis. Drunkenness. Adultery. Cussing out your mother. Anything AT ALL to do with the Occult. Reading the "Book of the Law " April 9, l0 or 11 to commemorate Aleister Crowley. Playing with Tarot cards. Playing with matches. Messing around with Ritual Magick. Acting too proud. Not acting proud enough.
 
 Just remember the words of the Athanasian Creed: 
"He ascended into Heaven, He sits on the Right hand of the FATHER, GOD Almighty: from whence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead. At Whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies: and shall give account of their own works. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting: and they that have done evil into everlasting fire." 
  -DB

Modern Day: Even more Things to Worry About

  Today the list of things to worry about is unfortunately greatly expanded. Sadly, terrorism is added to the list-as are economic difficulties in the U.S. with widespread unemployment and a growing budget deficit. The list of things to worry about shows little sign of diminishing.

 
           
    New Disease Spreading!
 
 

 Plague
  The Return of Smallpox
 Anthrax
  Brucellosis
 Prairie Dogs
 Encephalitis
 West Nile Virus

   Ashes, Ashes, All Fall Dead
 
 Plague's Return

 Catching the Plague

 Symptoms of Bubonic Plague:  Fever, headache, vomiting, pain, delerium, coma, death. The site of the original flea bite forms,  first a blister, later a blackish carbuncle.  Lymph nodes swell and suppurate, forming "buboes." Red colored spots appear on the skin. The formation of these red spots inspired the nursery rhyme "Ring around a Rosy."
 A "Health" item from the BBC online, September l999, raised the spector of possibility that the original l7th Century Black Death might return to Britain. Some black rats, rattus rattus,   the host with the most so far as plague-bearing fleas are concerned, have been sited in parts of the Scepter'd Isle. By the way, the transmission route is rat-flea-man.  "Man bites rat" might also work.
  The world's shrunk quite a bit. With folks just as quick to jet back and forth to all four corners of the globe  as we used to be to walk down to Main Street for a soda,  your disease in Tanzania is my disease in the U.S. of A. and visa verse.  (Now that's smart, how can a globe have corners!)
 
       The Return of Smallpox
 
  Smallpox vaccine is a bitch to administer! William Jenner discovered that milkmaids who had cowpox seemed immune from smallpox. So the earliest vaccines were administered straight from the cow. The dead cow lay on the table in the doctor's office, and the hordes and multitudes cluttered around and got their poison right from the cow. Since Jenner's time, medical science has gotten a lot less crude. Still, the vaccine gives you a live pox. The doctor makes a hole in your arm with a bifurcated needle and the pox is dropped right in.
  You'd think the first ones to be vaccinated in the event of smallpox attack would be the doctors. And likely that's right. But you can't have the doctors running around with a live, contagious pox on his arm running around the ER, even if it is kept under careful wraps. A vaccinated doc will be knocked out of the action for two or three weeks.
  Sometimes something called "accidental vaccination" happens. If one baby gets vaccinated and has the open pox mark, his brother or sister could rub into it and spread the pox all over their bodies. If someone gets unwittingly vaccinated that way and they have a weakened immune system -- well, let's not visit that just now. There is also a scenario called "progressive vaccinia" where the original vaccination smallpox site gets much, much worse. We're talking necrosis or worse.
  One in l,000,000 people who get vaccinated die. But if there's any consolation, smallpox makes you feel really crappy before the pox marks come out. There wouldn't be a situation where someone with smallpox got on a plane and infected everybody. The person would feel too sick to make the flight!
Things we never thought we'd have to worry about:
            Anthrax
 
 Mighty scary, yes. If it's any consolation, you can usually tell cutaneous anthrax from an insect bite because the anthrax looks like just one insect bite. If it really is an insect bite, you'd have seven or eight bites. In the more serious inhaled anthrax, the patient might not look too toxic at first, but as we all know, looks can be deceiving. One symptom that might tease out the diagnosis is tachycardia.
  So store up your Cipro and Doxycycline. Either is good for anthrax. The latter is also helpful in smallpox, brucellosis and plague.
 
        Brucellosis
 
  This is also called Cyprus fever, Gibraltar fever, Malta fever, Mediterranean fever, rock fever. It is mainly a disease of cattle, pigs, goats and some of our other four-legged friends. But people mess with these animals and drink some of their milk products. Or a simple break in the skin… Symptoms include fever, weight loss, headache, muscle and joint pain and the disease can either be acute or hang around for months. Although the disease doesn't usually kill, nasty things can develop: encephalitis, meningitis, pneumonia. So what out for that.
 
         Prairie Dogs
 

  These animals are regular reservoirs for bubonic plague. There are a lot of prairie dogs in the S.W. United States. And while on the subject of bubonic plague…….
  Other Stories
  I read also that a woman has given her husband part of her liver, the first transplant in the US involving a living adult liver donor who is not a blood relative of the recipient.  I guess if I donated part of my liver to someone, they would come up with anxious depression.
  A story came across the AP wire that Polar bears in the arctic are endangered by PCB's.  Researchers reported they found seven female polar bears with vestigial male organs. This anomaly might be caused by chemical toxicity. I start getting worried when I see sex organs changing, sperm counts being lowered, that sort of thing. I mean--reproduction--that's the Whole Hog, isn't it?
  Along that line, a new antidepressant has been approved in the U.S. by the FDA.  It is still another SSRI, called citralopram  (Celexa). The more, the merrier?
 
  Encephalitis in New York!  (four and twenty blackbirds)
 
A severe mosquito-borne form of viral encephalitis, the "West Nile virus," has struck New York. Birds first began dropping around the Bronx Zoo.  Later - people! 
 
  Crows were dropping like flies!  Health official sprayed the streets of New York. It read like a chapter from  "Death in Venice."  People in New York and points south were asked to box up dead crows and send the corpses in for toxicology tests. With the autumn migration of birds to the south,  the "West Nile virus" will sail right down with them. This disease is a "newbie" to the Western Hemisphere, but it is similar to St. Louis encephalitis.
 
          
   Getting struck by lightning:
 
 
No one is exempt from this unpleasant experience. Most of us know that a golf course is a great place to get struck. You can also try a beach.
Lightning tends to strike the highest thing, and on a beach a vertical person is the highest thing.
 Or--you
might even get struck sitting right where you are, on your computer chair.
 I read a newspaper article (N.Y. Times l Sept.98) which indicates that another dangerous seat is your toilet: electrical charges can travel through metal pipes. 
 Two women walking near the Rose Garden in Hyde Park, London, in Sept.99 met sad ends being struck by lightning. Findings at the inquest suggested that the METAL IN THEIR BRA might have acted to conduct the electrical charge to their hearts."
 The article goes on to explain that being struck by lightning gives you many more volts of electricity than being fried in an electric chair. But the shorter duration usually does not dispatch you into your next reincarnation -- unless the current passes through your heart and the heart stops beating.
 HOWEVER: many people who survive being struck by lightning do not emerge unscathed. Post-strike symptoms include seizures, memory problems,headaches, and sexual dysfunction. This list is not exhaustive.
Survivor support groups exist.
 
   1918 Flu and Beyond
 
 I have long had great interest in the virulent flu of 1918. This pandemic devastated the population, killing 20 million people or more worldwide.
 Some put the numbers at nearly twice that high. In those days, there were no antibiotics to treat the pneumonia and other bacterial infections that often invaded the virus-weary immune systems of the sufferers.
 
 We have antibiotics now--temporarily. Wouldn't it be something if it turns out that they are with us for only a couple of generations? We all know that they are rapidly losing their effectiveness. It is classic survival of the fittest: the antibiotics knock out 99% of the bacterial bugs so the resistent 1% live on to procreate!
 One curious thing about the 19l8 flu is that a few of its survivors were left with permanent sleeping sickness, eventually falling into a comatose state. This phenomenom was publicized in Oliver Sachs' book "Awakenings" and the film by the same name. The movie version has people waking up after 40 years, dancing around, falling in love and going on fun outings, courtesy of an experimental drug treatment. The small, newly aroused patient community is quickly sobered, however, upon noting that the person who had been reawakened the longest starts going back to sleep. Alas their wakeful bliss is temporary. Any bliss is.
 In reality, a few patients did show signs of temporary arousal but I don't think they did any dancing around.
 Scientists are now investigating the 1918 flu bug in a few bodies buried in the Norwegian permafrost. Their lungs are expected to exhibit the bug, which will then be sent to several laboratories.
 We all know that flus rapidly transmute. That's why the flu shot formula for this year won't do much good a few years down the line. The "lock" changes so the key no longer fits. And sometimes a fairly benign flu can mutate to the point where it is much more lethal--in short, we could have another deadly 1918-style pandemic.