Gramps Gets Night Cramps
I not uncommonly fall asleep on the love seat in the front room at bedtime, especially if the wood stove is glowing and radiating sleepiness into the darkness. As usual, last night I woke up after an hour or so,…
Category Health
To Mask or Not to Mask
There are many reasons now to err on the side of more precaution than less. Masks will bother you; they won't harm you. And they might save your life.
Contagion: Contained?
As a biologist, I’ve always been interested in epidemiology of disease, and as a zoologist, particular those that originate in wild or domestic animals. And so there has been quite a bit to keep up with regarding the zoonoses of…
One Word, Benjamin: Plastics
This advice was innocent enough, in a smarmy and ominously-prescient sort of way when the “the graduate” got this insider tip so many decades ago. It was certainly the way the world of profit and growth were going, even then,…
Saved by The MetaGenomics of Dirt
Below are some annotated bits from an article in Wired that describe the early successes in the battle to find weapons against the increasingly numerous and increasingly virulent microbes that are resistant to all known antibiotics. We worry about the…
Test-tube Earth: The Anthropocene Experiment
Innoculate, Feed, Wait, Observe We are living in the midst and are each of us part of a great experiment. There is no control group laid out to co-exist on a planet where our species has NOT altered the chemistry…
Population Limits: Galloping Male Infertility
Surely, amidst all the rumors of war and profane word-garbage from once-high places of power, you’ve seen the recent evidence that should scream an urgent message to those who control the future of science research, chemical misuse and pollution, and…
Health Reads 30 Mar 2017
I find it much easier to browse lately than to get in touch with the poor battered Muse from yesteryear. Alas, she is requesting a DNR order and who can blame her in such times? And so I have broad-brush…
When Trees Die, People Die
Did that phrase get your attention? It should. This was the title of an article in the Atlantic in 2013. And it is not poetic and abstract but factual and worthy of note. You will hear it referenced on Thursday…
Eight Years Later: Morgellons Linked to Lyme?
I think maybe, back when I was seeing patients as a physical therapist, one of them told me about a mysterious condition (their own, a friend’s, a child’s?) that “medicine” was dismissing as “delusional dermatopathy”—an itch all in the heads…
Resistance Far from Futile: Bacteria’s Amazing Adaptability
Bacterial resistance is far from futile. It happens with amazing speed. For bacterial hosts–like us–on the other hand,  resistance might be futile, here beyond the end of the age of the “overworked miracle” that once described antibiotics. Serving suggestion: watch the…
Sudden Onset Dementia: Could It Be Lyme?
It might be trivial. It might produce only an itchy spot or  symptoms that are brief and go away entirely. Or a tick bite could change your life in terrible ways for a long, long time. And worse, almost 70%…
Waste Not: Food Stewardship
Top headline here that I don’t want you to miss is that THIS WEEK–on Wednesday March 2, SustainFloyd will be presenting the first in our Spring movie season. Both the first and the second movies this year are about our…
More Hard Cold Facts
Since my post a few days ago, I’ve been in “discussion” with the wife who has certain, er, understandings of what we must do this side of my germ state. She has advocated for disinfection–short of threatening to burn all…