Hate in a Time of Cholera

Water sustainer of life is also the conduit of cholera deaths in Zimbabwe. Complicating the ever increasing numbers of deaths is tyrant extraordinaire Robert Mugabe claiming no problem. A person has to hate and loathe its people to deny a problem and proffered help from aid organizations or NGO's. Almost 10,000 cases with 412 confirmed deaths to date plus the spread into neighboring Botswana and South Africa screams bloody murder for a lack of urban public health infrastructure containment and fast action on part of Zimbabwe's inept government. Shades of George Bush in America's dénouement during Katrina, but weirdly juxtaposed against Africa policy being one of his singular net positive achievements.

Hygiene is a matter of life and death while the midst of a crisis is not an opportune time for educating the people. Out of necessity, Zimbabwe's citizenry is getting a crash course along with buckets, soap and water treatment tablets. Don't use the water and that goes double for the cities. Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, remains politically aflame amidst contested election results and a mountain of constitutional amendments meant to secure powers for Mugabe against rival Morgan Tsvangirai. Rural

UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) spokeswoman Veronique Taveau said that unlike previous outbreaks that mainly affected rural areas, the current epidemic is affecting densely-populated urban centres, "which leads to itsrapid expansion and makes it harder to fight against the disease."

Jean-Philippe Chauzy of the International Organization for Migration said Zimbabweans fleeing deprivation in their country were contributing to spreading the disease.

Zimbabwe belatedly changed its tune Thursday and asked for international help to fight the outbreak after long insisting that the
situation was under control.

"With the coming of the rainy season, the situation could get worse," said deputy health minister Edwin Muguti. "Our problems are quite simple. We need to be helped."

With a belated invite, the International Committee of the Red Cross and a plethora of United Nations agencies are rushing to put their fingers in the dikes as hordes collapse in a dam of humanity. People providing care to victims are starving and others are spreading the disease crossing the borders into neighboring nations. Inflation was so bad Zimbabwe's bankrupt treasury had to issue a 10,000,000,000 bill as prices for bread, gas and clean bottled water went up hourly. Day to day survival left little time for the niceties of proper hygiene in the middle of the slums or in rural areas where supply chains are figments of imagination. Yet, Zimbabwe is a bountiful country blessed with a Mosi-oa-Tunya UNESCO designation since the late 1980s for Victoria Falls which should facilitate tourism that would make a less corrupt government solvent under competent leadership.

"Some of the staff workingin the clinics have not received a salary for weeks, and they cannot keep working if we do not get them food," ICRC spokeswoman Anna Schaaf said.

The agency said on
Thursday it was doubling the budget of its Zimbabwe office to nearly 13 million Swiss francs ($11 million) in 2009. "The situation in hospitals is catastrophic," ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger told Reuters.

Zimbabwe's inflation is more than 230 million percent. Its economic crisis has caused many public hospitals to close, and most towns suffer from only intermittent water supplies, broken sewers, and uncollected garbage.

A dire situation is playing out as a UN mandated power sharing governance model between Zunu-PF (Team Mugabe) versus Movement for Democratic Change (the opposition) suffers the tortures of the diseased as resources trickle in to the hardest hit areas in Eastern Zimbabwe. The rainy season starts in late November and lasts until April. Western nations were accused of enjoying what they see coming from the mandated sanctions by Mugabe loyalists like the utterly failed Deputy Health Minister, Edwin Muguti. Memo to M2, Mugabe and Mufuti - sanctions rendered unnecessary where democracy flourishes and Human Rights receive all due respect.

A story with heart that goes deep inside the cultural mores and restrictions that form life in Zimbabwe as told by a journalist with skin in the game, Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir. Newlywed white man with African American wife gets a detailed education in African politics as told in autobiographical format from Neely Tucker.

Dirty Dozen Diseases Plot World Domination

Twelve different dirty microscopic pathogens are gearing up to decimate the world. Their germ fuel to grow stronger, faster, deadlier is Climate Change. Earth is going broke in the financial greed demolition derby, placing a precarious world at risk to prepare against a takeover by a dozen powerful germs. Cash is required to fight the marauding germs to buy and distribute drugs and doctors efficiently into containment zones. People on the move from famine, fighting and fallow farms will just accelerate the spread of diseases as refugee crises take on nightmare proportions. Mix in deadly destruction from desertification, storms and flooding and the germs are rubbing their grubby little cells in glee. Most of the world watches as their money turns into unusable leprechaun gold without apparent appreciation that their health is also at stake as the animal kingdom falls prey. Scarcity makes people antsy and it beckons tin pot dictators to unilaterally take decisions to try and take over the world, especially if a two front war develops in the financial markets and a full scale effort to eradicate spreading diseases or pandemics. Who's military will have the money to stop them?

Animals spread disease. Climate change is altering the bounds of nature and pathogens are mutating while animals, mammals, birds and fowl are being eaten. Wildlife experts are screaming at the top of their lungs while global financial markets have people mesmerized as education hopes and retirement dreams float away in the world's legalized gambling meccas. As food prices skyrocket, a celebratory steak may come from a mad cow and that super special Peking duck may have had bird flu are making the remaining wealthy just as vulnerable. China has made it clear making money comes before public health and safety and that's precisely where America's corporate elite put their business chips to increase management's profits and the almighty bonuses.

Ebola, Cholera Notice & Avian Influenza

The resource rich continent of Africa is a hot bed incubator for disease outbreaks as the climate changes habitats for humans, insects and beasts of burden. Waterborne diseases will devastate health as well as its scarcity making crops fail and refugee stampedes likely. Standing water attracts mosquitoes which are disease carriers for malaria and yellow fever. China has long been noted as a location of origin for the H5N1 bird flu to morph to a human flu that would make the the Black Death of the Middle Ages or the 1918 pandemic that felled millions seem small in scope. China's algae problem blossomed stinky lime green right before the Olympics in a 100,000 ton fashion, but it the poisonous red algae tides that will kill off marine life and make eating fish a more perilous exercise.

"The term 'climate change' conjures images of melting ice caps and rising sea levels
that threaten coastal cities and nations, but just as important is how increasing temperatures and fluctuating precipitation levels will change the distribution of dangerous pathogens," said Steven E. Sanderson, president and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

"The health of wild animals is tightly linked to the ecosystems in which they live and influenced by the environment surrounding them, and even minor disturbances can have far reaching consequences on what diseases they might encounter and transmit as climate changes. Monitoring wildlife health will help us predict where those trouble spots will occur and plan how to prepare."

The "Deadly Dozen" list - including such diseases as avian influenza, ebola, cholera, and tuberculosis - is illustrative only of the broad range of infectious diseases that threaten humans and animals, according to a WCS release.

Cholera is a waterborne disease of opportunity from lack of sanitation mixed with water which is prevalent in a myriad of developing countries. Iraq is still suffering from large outbreaks of cholera. Lyme Disease is already in the US and proliferating in the tick community that spreads it to humans. Recently, Malaysia completed a simulation for an outbreak on a plane. Babesiosis is a tropical tick germ that styles itself as a malaria like invasion of the body. Wide eyed raccoons are susceptible to parasites that turn into worms, Baylisascaris procyonis. Animals are our canaries on the Earth mine.



Climate change made clear with charts graphs and analogies that make sense. It draws upon the Nobel Peace Prize winning work of the United Nations IPCC scientific work to make Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming a seminal book on the topic. It is a great book to have alongside An Inconvenient Truth from last year's Co-Nobel Peace prize recipient, Al Gore.

More Costly Pills, Less Time Talking

Talking it through, over it or around it is not the first option for more psychiatrists in the 21st century. Pills targeted towards specific areas of the brain, psychometric drugs are the new remedies favored by the shrinking class. Scary on multiple levels, but especially since all the pill residue ends up in the drinking water of innocents with other issues.

Psychotherapy since father Freud has undergone profound evolution with the profession now in a pill revolution. In less than ten years since 1996, psychotherapy has gone from about half of the treatment options to less than 30% with the embrace of the pills. At some level of good or for ill (and of course, capitalistic profit motives), Big Pharma has offered a profuse array of colored pills to all manner of specialties in medicine. Mental problems, here's a pill, is something that has pernicious overtones as emergency practitioners may have no idea what mind altering drug someone is taking or what the effects of mixing certain compounds. But an uglier disturbing truth is its all about the money that the pill pushers make. Same economic truth works for Big Pharma as buying crack on the corner. The person that cuts the inefficiencies in the supply chain and controls distribution makes the most money.

"These trends highlight a gradual but important change in the content of outpatient psychiatric care in the United States and a continued shift toward medicalization of psychiatric practice," wrote Drs. Mojtabai and Olfson.

In an interview, Dr. Mojtabai said financial incentives are probably driving the change.

He said that under typical reimbursement rates, a psychiatrist who conducts one 45-minute psychotherapy session will receive 40% less than if he or she saw three patients for 15-minute medication management visits.

It leads to an awful discussion on medical records. If people know what kind of drug your taking, then its a small matter of inference and deduction as to what internal malady one may suffer from. There has been a huge publicity around medical professionals snooping inside medical records. Prescription Pills make that much easier because they go down so well with the TV marketing campaigns that brainwash so many viewers.

As talk therapy declined, TV ads contributed to an "aura of invincibility" around drugs for depression and anxiety, said Charles Barber, a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale University and author of "Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation."

"By contrast, there's almost no marketing for psychotherapy, which has comparable if not better outcomes," said Barber, who was not involved in the study.

Read the book, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation, then really decide whether the latest pill shortcut is in your best interest. Charles Barber cites several studies and gives some astounding insights as author of this book. The particular title of that book seems to be very popular.

PS Ack! Blogger is freaking out and not letting images upload. will put them in later. I need a pill...

The Breakfast Diet Keeps the Weight Off

A few flakes of corn or wheat, add a couple of slices of a banana or sprinkle some berries around splashing on some milk or take steaming hot from the nuke chamber a ceramic bowl filled with oatmeal and raisins or even go au naturel with the crunchiest of homemade granola, fruit and slurp fresh squeezed orange juice, pulp and all, and the result is teenagers most of all have an inbuilt mechanism that controls weight gain. People spend billions of dollars a year trying to find the magic weight loss recipe. Another study proves again, a simple regular affair every morning, such as breakfast keeps the weight off, especially for teens. Cereal through the lips, keeps weight off da hips should be the high school cheer.

"There's a pretty significant inverse association between how frequently kids report eating breakfast and how much weight they gain over time, and we took into account other dietary factors and physical activity," said Mark Pereira, co-author of the study, published in the March issue of Pediatrics.

"It's interesting to note that the kids who eat breakfast on a daily basis overall have a much better diet and are more physically active," Pereira said.

Added Dr. Peter Richel, chief of pediatrics at Northern Westchester Hospital Center in Mount Kisco, N.Y.: "Grandma and Mom are right. When we skip breakfast, especially in the teenage years, then kids tend to snack and graze."

An estimated 12 percent to 34 percent of children and adolescents skip breakfast on a regular basis, a number that increases with age. Previous studies have linked breakfast skipping with a greater tendency to gain weight.

Stop skipping the breakfast of champions, the magically delicious, and the floating O's made of honey nuts and oats. For weight conscious teens, the incentive is built in and keeps them healthier longer. Not to mention more alert and less lethargic, acting as if they were seventy years past their prime. For those with a bit more time and resources the choices of having a hot meal in the morning complete with hot cakes and other griddle delights keep you away from the horrors of the vending machines and more alert for the day's challenges. take it from someone whose father made a hot breakfast every morning for year. Thanks Daddy, you did a world of good!

The Project EAT study, titled “Breakfast Eating and Weight Change in a 5-Year Prospective Analysis of Adolescents: Project EAT,” started five years ago when study participants were adolescents. Now in their teens, those who ate breakfast daily are thinner and have a lower body mass index (BMI) than those that frequently skipped breakfast. BMI is a measurement used to determine risk of obesity.

Many people, including teens, think skipping breakfast is an effective way to limit calories but the opposite is actually true, according to Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, PhD, Project EAT’s principal investigator. Skipping breakfast leads to overeating later in the day, especially in the evenings.

No one should take this to mean that the stuff coated with frosting on cereal, bread, or with huge amounts of high fructose corn syrup on other donut enticements is a-OK. It's not. The onset of juvenile diabetes is reaching epidemic levels and being overweight to the point of obesity is now a common accepted recurring nightmare based on food choices made by price, not eating a nutritional breakfast or the level of sugar on the product that makes the unwary succumb to how bad it actually is after the sugar rush melts away. Eating products with a heart healthy and high cholesterol inhibitor, such as in the oat family is usually a great way to go.


Too help with breakfast, a book from about a young Korean teen who is just lost in teenage angst about how to make his lonely life work, especially in his neck of suburbia. David Yoo brings details that will make one wince and laughter to the teen saga, Girls for Breakfast. Reading and eating breakfast at the same time is GREAT!

Corny Food Fights

Fast, easy, and dirt cheap informs choices of what many gobble up with hopefully clean fingers, wooden chopsticks, silverware or the latest dorky spork. Though it looks steamy fresh, even smells divine, chances are excellent, it sprung from genetically modified seeds, had hormonal injections, was bred in a fishery, had poisonous chemicals sprayed on it, was irrigated with water filled with animal poo from a neighboring farm, or after being cloned - the animal was force fed and stuffed to the gills to get the best fois gras. Becoming more rare, food fit for toddlers and the elderly, actually arriving as Mother Nature intended from a local food source, rather than mass produced at an industrial farm. Organic farming, with all natural materials costs a royal ransom, making real food more available on the snowy white linen-laden, heirloom tables of the ultra chic and wannabe thin wealthy.

Agribusinesses are pernicious profit-laden businesses that farm on a Texas sized scale for the huddled masses. Industrialized corporate farm's choice of crops are based on return on investment with their public relations amped up to increase global market share by shouting look at us - we feed (some of) the world's poor and undernourished while spreading a small percentage of our profits to public television and other needy causes to enhance our benevolent image. Corporate corn, the cash crop - instead of being a primary food, it is sold to make energy products, like ethanol, making corn expensive for humans to even eat. But that is just the beginning.
(DPA Photo)

Because corporate corn soaks up water like a soil sponge, farming it decreases water supplies and inflates water bills as local population increase, placing a Herculean demand on antique water distribution and sewage systems. Mix in a few droughts and the cost of corporate corn grows Jack & the cornstalk high, while the evil additive High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) seeps and creeps into an astounding array of products. Subsidized corporate corn is cheaply put into every piece of candy, added to juice drinks, jellies, jams, and spread on other supposedly nutritious foods. Healthcare costs explode and it becomes unaffordable when one of the culprits, such as corporate corn masquerading as HFCS contributes to diabetes, hypertension and dental disasters, creating health crises the world over.

Meanwhile, corporate corn is a feed crop for the industrialized chicken farms that the finger lickin' good people use or the I'm lovin' it folks nuke to perfection to fulfill the demand for fast, easy, cheap food. Checking how the sizzling strips of bacon arrived on your plate from a stinky smelly industrial process hog farm, may just make the consumer love pigs in Charlotte's Web or Babe or see the New Year's good luck pigs in German zoos in the future. (AP photo)

Britain is implementing more government bans on junk food ads, especially on shows enjoyed by young people because of the increase in obesity and juvenile onset diabetes from fast food. Europe refuses grain from the US because they will not accept genetically modified seeds and destroy existing plant strains. Bacteria poisoning eaten by unwary consumer is cropping up all around the globe. China has had one helluva year as recall after recall made the leaders even do a promotional food safety campaign. Small farmers are being squeezed all the world over as water becomes more scarce as corporations, public private partnerships buy rights from broke governments and give tax subsidies to the corporate farmers.

Five kinds of pesticides that the (sic Chinese) ministry banned for their high toxicity have been seized and destroyed.

The ministry also issued six regulations on pesticide registry management to standardize labeling and control product quantities.

Food a source of delight for those with enough money to make good choices or even hedonistic ones. Just getting a meal once a day is a struggle for most of the world's population. Many who look healthy or are even plumper than most, may in fact be undernourished.

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto is a widely recommended and critically acclaimed book springing from the equally stunning, intensely researched Omnivore's Dilemma by the same author, Michael Pollan. Eat more plants and other practical insights are common sense offerings in his latest book about our food supply.

Get that Blood Pressure checked while enjoying something green, leafy tasty!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY RICHARD!!!

A Few Doctors & Seven Magical Myths of Medicine

Once upon a time, doctors believed all manner of horrible things that turned out not to be true. After the Dark Ages, doctors used western astrology to explain epidemics as a medical matter of stellar misalignment and unlucky planet placement. In 1799, hungry leeches were the prescribed remedy for bleeding George Washington of his high fever and the "cure" killed him. It came as quite a revelation during the American Civil War, 1861-1865, that cleaner operating rooms, washed laundry and spruced up patients made a world of difference in the wounded surviving - after another doctor in 1847 said fewer women would die after giving birth of childbed fever if linens were clean. News bears repeating and a few cataclysmic events before some people learn. (picture from Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry)

In the 21st century, some doctors cling to seven myths found untrue by two Indiana based, university researchers for a report in the British Medical Journal . Though not even close to deadly, these selected modern myths have reserved handicapped mind parking spaces for a few men and women with $100,000 + medical educations. It serves as more of a warning that no profession is completely free of non-critical thinkers. Nor are these the only seven magical myths some doctors still believe.

Drink 8 glasses of water a day is a watery tale because of the amount of H2O also in our food. It was a 1945 recommend that many still take as a Health Gospel.

Humans use only 10% of brain. Oh gosh, must resist jokes,...must resist...failed. Non-listeners Anonymous will be up and running soon for the addicted many speaking 100% of the nonsense in their head as if it came from the 10% genius discount store. Supposedly Einstein said something, but nothing is on the record. A brain bustling with electricity isn't in 'standby' mode at any time no matter how badly we wish it could happen to certain cretins among us.

It's spooky and it's creepy...No! Fingernails and hair will not continue to grow after Death.

This almost seems like someone was picking on a certain French custom. Shaving hair causes it to grow back faster, darker, or coarser.

Reading in dim light will ruin, just plain ruin your eyesight. No, just makes a person squint, blink and tear up on a more consistent basis, kind of like watching Imitation of Life or an Affair to Remember. Go blind, no. Bugs Bunny and I shall remain mum on the carrot stalk hypothesis.

Eating too much turkey will make the diner drowsy. Turkey is not the cause of that heavy feeling in the pit of the stomach no matter the admonitions. That's the cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, half dozen dinner rolls, cornbread dressing, asparagus, baked ham, 4 glasses of flaming punch, green beans, Ambrosia salad and second helpings of a rich chocolate fudge cake with a piece of apple pie a la mode on the side.

Cell phones interfere with medical equipment in hospitals and may cause patients to suffer. Fact checking site, Snopes, knocked that one down with no attributable deaths to the alleged phenomenon. To me, its the plane thing where now airlines are finding ways for passengers to use (pay) for all the electrical ringing, buzzing, singing and DVD playing stuff one lugs about in their daily lives.

The list of medical myths that shall live just a tiny bit longer just got a bit shorter.



More serious medical tales and accepted business practices in the modern medical community come under intense scrutiny in the 2007 second edition release of Health Myths Exposed: How Western Medicine Undermines Your Health, by M.Sc. Shane Ellison.