Do you guys…wanna talk about this stuff? It’s pretty exciting. Better than a carved pumpkin, I say, and, unlike a carved pumpkin, these things will be with us for years and years and years.

Bird flu has it rough these days. It’s tough to compete with brain-eating amoeba. People don’t really connect with “dead Indonesian boy” as they do with “Banquet pot pie.”

MRSA seems to be the super star. If there were an Academy Awards show for infectious disease, I’d be putting my money on MRSA.

Let’s take a look!

CDC/ Bruno Coignard, M.D.; Jeff Hageman, M.H.S.

And here’s the close-up:

Credit: Janice Carr
CDC/ Jim Biddle

Don’t you just love the holidays? I wonder what we’ll be having for Thanksgiving…

Coffee also does not taste right. It tastes like poison, too. Today, my Starbucks tasted like peppermint.

Tap water has been tasting like it’s food-flavored or, yeah - poisoned.

Whatever is going on here? Why, it’s dysgeusia - an altered and distorted sense of taste and/or smell.

At times, I have an increased sense of smell, which also falls under the category of dysgeusia. Increased taste/smell is called hypergeusia.

Dysgeusia is pronounced dis-gooz-ee-a. Gooz.

If everything tasted metallic, that could be a symptom of pregnancy. Or cancer.

This site talks about how dysgeusia might be a neurological issue due to a viral infection. Ooh. Aah.

Here’s a nice list of reasons (from doctorstrust.com) one might be experiencing dysgeusia:

“Dysgeusia…can be caused by upper respiratory tract infection, hormonal changes, tobacco smoke, or nasal polyps. Certain medications, like the blood pressure–lowering drug captopril (Capoten) and antibiotics such as metronidazole (Flagyl), may also cause an altered sensation of taste. Sometimes, the cause of dysgeusia is unknown; this is called idiopathic dysgeusia.”

Other causes include (from MedlinePlus):

“Aging (the number of taste buds decrease with age)
Bell’s palsy
Common cold
Flu
Gingivitis
Heavy smoking (especially pipe smoking)
Injury to the mouth, nose, or head
Mouth dryness
Nasal infection, nasal polyps, sinusitis
Pharyngitis
Salivary gland infections
Side effects of medicines, including antithyroid drugs, captopril, griseofulvin, lithium, penicillamine, procarbazine, rifampin, vinblastine, and vincristine
Sjogren’s syndrome
Strep throat
Vitamin B-12 or zinc deficiency”

I’m gonna take a multivitamin.

There’s more, too. One can experience dysgeusia (per InteliHealth) from:

Chemotherapy drugs
A brain tumor
Damage to the taste nerves
Metabolic problems, such as diabetes, thyroid disease or liver problems
Depression
Laryngectomy (removal of the voice box)

If you’re experiencing dysgeusia, you might want to mention it to your doctor, especially if it worsens or continues for more than a week.

Now that you know about dysgeusia, another fun word you might wanna toss around at your next cocktail party is xerostomia. It means dry mouth. At the party, you can tell people you have dysgeusia due to xerostomia. You’ll be the belle of the ball!

Xerostomia can be caused by all kinds of things, and is a common side effect of many medications.

In addition to xerostomia and dysgeusia, I’ve got some major fatigue goin’ on, so I must leave this post tagless and without pictures and get myself to sleep. I haven’t found a fancy word for super fatigue, but I’ll let you know if I do.

Super fatigue can be a symptom of pregnancy. Or cancer. It can also be a symptom of any number of autoimmune conditions.

I have a few autoimmune conditions, one of which can cause xerostomia!

What a tangled web I weave.

Good night, sleep tight, and I promise the bedbug stories are on the way!

People with hookworms appear to suffer far less from allergies, asthma, and hay fever, as well as autoimmune conditions like MS and Crohn’s disease.

Which do you think it is - immune system, sans parasites, all bored and deciding to rough up the neighborhood? Or, do you think it’s that the parasites pump out suppressive chemicals that our immune systems have adjusted to, so much so that, in the absence of these chemicals, our immune systems do not know how to behave properly.

I suppose it comes down to the same thing. Our bodies miss worms.

Photo courtesy of CDC’s Public Health Image Library

That there is what little baby hookworms look like when they are snuggling into a dog’s intestines.

O, worms. O sweet, writhing, hook-faced treasures. Angels, won’t you please come for a stay in my intestines? Then I can trade out my Claritin OTC - one med down, a dozen more to go.

Do you think worms could take care of my other things, too, the other things for which I take pills? I think that they might, especialy things like my yet-to-be-named autoimmune conditions.

Here’s the life cycle of hookworms, as usual, courtesy of the CDC’s public health image library:

CDC says, “Barely visible larvae penetrate the skin (often through bare feet), are carried to the lungs, go through the respiratory tract to the mouth, are swallowed, and eventually reach the small intestine. This journey takes about a week.”

Wikipedia, being Mr. Buzz Kill, has this to say about hookworms:

“Hookworm is a leading cause of maternal and child morbidity in the developing countries of the tropics and subtropics. In susceptible children hookworms cause intellectual, cognitive and growth retardation, intrauterine growth retardation, prematurity, and low birth weight among newborns born to infected mothers.”

But, if you’re not a mother or child in a developing country, probably the worst that could happen is some anemia from blood loss. That’s not so bad now, is it? A fair trade for hay fever. Vitamins instead of Claritin. Worms instead of my body eating itself.

The body misses the worms eating, so the body gnaws away at itself. Romantic, really. Tragically romantic.

I’m done here. Adios.

hookworm, autoimmune, allergies, hayfever, worms, Zooillogix, immune system, romance

Woah. Where am I? Who am I?

It’s true. I read the news about B. Spears (if you do too, here’s a blog with all the latest Britney news). I find her to be very compelling.

So yes, who is this blog again?

O yeah - science. Science…mmm…

You guys heard about that meteor that crashed in Peru and made a cow die and also made the people who went to see it, it made those people get all sick and pukey - you heard about that, right?

If you did not, here’s a link to the BBC story. Some fun quotes:

“The crater spewed what officials described as fetid, noxious gases.”

Hot!

“The gases are believed to have affected the health of hundreds of people who visited the site.

Most of the victims have been complaining of headaches, vomiting and nausea.

Honorio Campoblanco, one of Peru’s leading geologists, called on the authorities to stop people going near the crash site.”

Sure, I suppose staying away might help things, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as exciting.

Why o why is no one guessing what gases might be coming from the meteorite? Does anyone have any ideas? Maybe the Angry Toxicologist will know.

Maybe it’s only mass hysteria. Wouldn’t that be a letdown?

Let’s have some more meteorite fun tomorrow, shall we?

meteor, meteorite, Peru, Britney, gases, noxious, outerspace, Angry Toxicologist

A study by the British Journal of Dermatology has shown that wearing tight socks, even just once, can leave sock scars on a baby’s legs.

Socks and, I imagine, tight socks, have been around for so long. Why are we only noticing now?

Everyone please take a moment to examine your lower calf for sock scars.

The article, here at BBC News Health, explains that it’s important to know about sock lesions so as to differentiate them from other, more serious conditions, like birth defects.

No one knows if the scars will be permanent, although, in some children, they have seen the scars persist for months, even years.

Moral of this story: sock your babies very carefully. Give their little legs plenty of sock room at the top of their socks.

Tight socks are the worst, no?

Moving on, Russia is shooting gerbils into space. Somehow, this is going to help them in their quest to put people on Mars.

From the BBC article:

“The Russian space agency has blasted 10 gerbils into space for a 12-day mission to test the possible effects on humans of a flight to Mars.”

Also:

“The 10 are all sand rodents, praised as ‘a very interesting object for research’ because they ‘can live for more than a month without using liquids,’ said Anatoly Grogoryev of the Russian Academy of Science.”

A month without any liquids! Why, just like us! On Mars!

What?

I’m sure they know what they’re doing. Something about salt exchange in…in space. They’re even filming the gerbils up in their little gerbil spacecraft, and have installed machines that will clean up their droppings.

I hope this footage becomes available on youtube.

Look out, Mars - here we come.

Mommies and daddies - don’t leave your babies alone with any suspicious socks.

The end.

There’s this (from the AP article on Google): “[Health Minister] Makwenge [Kaput] did not say whether the outbreak had been contained.” The number of infections is still rising, but the number of deaths is falling, now that everyone’s being taken care of.

I’m sure it’ll be fine. Ebola, so far, is so good at making people ill that they don’t get all that far before they, like, fall down, so the disease hasn’t managed to spread too far, not yet. Maybe it’ll get lucky someday.

That’s what all these bugs are tryin’ to do - get lucky.

That’s what every single alive thing is tryin’ to do - get lucky.

O, sigh.

I’m goin’ on a trip tomorrow, so I might not get back to you ’till late Wednesday, early Thursday. I will be hyper vigilant in my quest to acquire new information from the world of science while I am out in the big, wide world.

Until I return, avoid the Congo area if at all possible. Probably avoid it after I return, too, unless you’ve got a really good reason for going there. Bleeding out of one’s eyeballs, while good for dramatic picture taking, is not really a funtime. Not that I have experience with such a thing. I’m guessing. A hypothesis, let’s call it. All official and science-like.

‘night!

Repeat.

The dark side of the moon does not exist.

There is not one side of the moon that is always dark. There is one side of the moon that we never see from the earth, but it gets as much light as the side we see. When the moon is dark to us, except during eclipses, the moon is light on the “dark side.”

See? Here’s the dark side being…not so dark.

Image Courtesy o’ NASA

It was such a romantic idea, no? The dark side of the moon…eternally cold, uber-barren.

It does not exist, so said the lady at the Griffith Observatory. She worked there, and had a gigantic mobile which showed how it works and everything, so I’ll take her word for it, especially since I’m not so great at the 3D abstracts.

O, I found a boyfriend at the observatory.

He’s really smart and knows all kinds of things. Perhaps he’ll be able to explain this whole moon business so that I finally get it straight.

moon, dark side of the moon, Griffith Observatory, orbit, lunar, sun, earth, light, dark

It’s not nice, really, to keep calling my fatigue tsetse. Tsetse fly transmitted sleeping sickness is a pretty horrible deal, and involves much more than fatigue.

Still, it’s sorta catchy. I enjoy the repitition. Tsetse. Yumyums. Jawjaw.

Jawjaw? That’s what I’m gonna quickly tell you about or, more specifically, direct you to.

New discovery - moray eels have a second, secret ’till now set of jaws that extends forward when they open their mouth wide. These secret jaws grab into and onto the food, and pull it back into their gullets. Mmm.

Our jaws come from a series of pharyngeal slits that all vertebrates have. Ours - those are the “gill slits” that we’ve got when we’re embryos. One set of ours turn into jaws. Then, the rest turn into things like ears and…inner head parts.

In other vertebrates, like fish, the pharyngeal thingies turn into jaws and gills.

I’m sure it’s much more complex than my explanation here. And o how I would love to tell you about the characteristics that all vertebrates have in common. I’ll tell you this now - one of the characteristics or features that ALL vertebrates have is this: they all have pharyngeal slits.

How does this have to do with tsetse and yumyum and eels? Eels use one pair o’ slits for jaws, and then they use yet another set of pharyngeal slits to make that second, inner, secret set of jaws, the jaws that come forward to clamp down on their prey. Jawjaws snatch yumyums. Hooray for moray!

PZ Myers has an excellent description of the process on his blog, Pharyngula. Here’s the link. He’s also got pictures and video, showing that second jaw coming forward.

Now, here’s some illustrations of a human embryo, showing the pharyngeal structures and what they are busy doing. Arch=slit=pharyngeal structure that we’ve been talking about. Mandible and maxilla = bottom and top jaws.

18-21 days old

27-30 days old
Wilhelm His (1831-1904)
1888 - Anatomie menschlicher Embryonen

moray eel, eel, jaws, Pharyngula, development, embryo, fetus, pharyngeal slits, gill slits, vertebrate, gills, yumyum, tsetse, PZ Myers

I have trouble believing that anything is ever really over, but here’s what Dr. Charles Rupprecht, a CDC rabies expert, told Reuters (link to story at Yahoo news here):

“Even though we still live in a sea of rabies and even though we have rabies viruses circulating among raccoons and foxes and bats, the dog rabies virus, which is the most responsible for dog-to-dog transmission and which is still the greatest burden to humans … it is that virus that has been eliminated.”

Eliminated. Wow.

Even so, I’m a bit taken by the idea of a sea of rabies. So I googled “sea of rabies.” Know what I found?

Dr. Charles Rupprecht, throughout the years, telling everyone about how we are all living in a sea of rabies.

I wanna cool line like that. These days, I’m most easily found by typing in things like “egg laying hentai” or “pokeporno” (Symptoms of a Girl - that’s me!). I mean, those things are pretty cool, I guess, if you’re into…those sorts of things. Me, I’m more into a sea of rabies.

Anyway, hooray for us and for dogs and hooray for Dr. Charles Rupprecht.

Dogs will still need to be vaccinated, ’cause dog rabies lives on all over the world.

We now live on an island in a sea of dog rabies.

Goodnight. Sleep tight. I promise that the bedbug story is coming.

ps - I was gonna put up a picture of a rabid dog, but it was too upsetting to look at. I would put up a picture of egg-laying hentai or pokeporno, but a) I don’t really know what either one entails, and b) I think it might get me into some trouble. I don’t wanna drag 451 Press into the gutter now, do I? Of course, I’m assuming that egg-laying hentai and pokeporno belong in the gutter. Perhaps that’s presumptuous of me. I apologize in advance.

pps - If you’re into all things meta, you’ll be pleased to know that, by typing this post into the internet, I’ve managed to a) link myself to “sea of rabies,” and b) link Dr. Charles Rupprecht and 451 Press to egg-laying hentai and pokeporno.

rabies, canine, dog, eliminated, CDC, Charles Rupprecht, sea of rabies, meta

“…nine [of seven] intensive care ventilators…could be ‘influenced’ by mobiles.

Of these, six were described by the researchers as ‘hazardous’…

Critical care monitors were also vulnerable, with seven out of 13 disrupted by mobile signals, while three out of seven syringe pumps were affected [two of which were hazardous].

Other devices which suffered problems were dialysis machines [one hazardous event], external pacemaker machines [one hazardous event], feeding pumps and even air humidifiers.”
BBC News article

A hazardous event is defined by the study (which can be found here as a PDF) as “direct physical influence on the patient by an unintended change in equipment function, for example total stopping of ventilator or syringe pump.”

Total stopping of ventilator doesn’t sound so good, does it? Many of these events occurred without any alarms going off.

The average distance between the mobile device and the equipment, when the events occurred, was three centimeters. That’s pretty close, but you’ve got to consider things like a BlackBerry stuffed in a doctor’s pocket as he/she leans over the patient and/or equipment. Some incidents occurred at a distance of a few hundred centimeters.

The study supports maintaining the current rule of keeping mobile devices one meter away from the patient’s bedside and from any equipment. Restrictions have been relaxed over time, especially since medical staff use these devices to, like, do their job. Even so, with new and fancier wireless technology, it’s best to keep a safe distance.

Moral of the story: Do not check your Myspace while sitting at someone’s bedside in the ICU. Shut that stuff down, and keep it off until you are many, many centimeters away from any and all medical-type equipment, lest your Palm Pilot stop someone’s heart.

O, a centimeter is like an inch, except it is smaller and therefore inferior.

That is a joke about how America is better than other countries, according to America, of course.

Ah, America…

Critical Care Journal, mobile, cell phones, study, hazardous, restrictions, distance, equipment, ICU, BlackBerry, interfere, centimeter