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People be crazy

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OK, not all people of course, but quite a lot.

How else to explain the rise of reality shows, influencers, scam artists and dictators run amok? Realpolitik be damned, when corruption and stupidity is this rife you have to consider that the politik has tilted into the surreal.

One tries to ignore all the eejeets who want to separate or break things but hands over the ears and la-la-la only works so far.

AIn’t Misbehaving.

There was a terrific cartoon in The Economist a few weeks back. I can’t reproduce it here because I have too much respect for copyright but the gist of it was a parallel with Jurassic Park. Cyberassic Park, with a Jeep driving into a compound surrounded by barbed wire assuring guests that the “creatures” were safely inside and couldn’t escape. Meanwhile, you saw a hole in the other side of the fence and the tail end of what looked like a brontosaurus. Given the number of AI um agents/actors/programs having hacked into various and sundry “unhack-able” systems, it seemed apt.

Of course the real question is who will be left to tell the story if AI really does get out of its cage and becomes sentient or conscious or just plain mean.

Meanwhile, a rather lovely woman, Dolly Parton, died not so long ago. I’ve never been a country music fan but of course like everyone I knew of Dolly. Her Imagination Library sent books to children; her songs lifted our spirits and her many, often quiet, donations to the needy meant she died a “mere” multi-millionaire, not the billionaire she could have been. Could one even picture a Zuckerberg or Musk doing that?

A short while later Gloria Steinem died, at 92. Dolly was 80. They both lived long, full lives but somehow it seemed wrong to lose to strong, resilient women in one month. Of course in Dolly’s case her husband of nearly 60 years had died less than a year before and grief has a way of catching up to one.

Mais c’est la vie

But things happen, people come, people go. Good people die and horrid ones hang on. This isn’t the first time in history things looked pretty grim but it is the first time we’ve been informed of it every minute of every day. So it seems to me that the only way to think about it all is to broaden our horizon and put things in perspective.

During the sixties, when I was too young to care, nuclear annihilation was around the corner as the Soviet Union loomed large and evil. Any second now we were all going to die. But we didn’t.

At the turn of the century the Y2K software hiccup was going to turn the world upside down, destroy all our records and turn us into some version of the Lord of the Flies. It didn’t. Life went on. We endured.

And while it may seem as though there’s more crime, more stupidity, more nonsense. if you think about it from a statistical perspective it’s really not that different. Think about it. Only a few decades ago, global population was around three billion. Now it’s eight. Eight billion people. So if you shift from thinking about it all from absolute to relative terms, really, there’s always been some monster lurking under the bed. But in relative terms it hasn’t changed so much. After all, if only (let’s say) about 10% of people do awful things, ten per cent of eight billion is a lot more people.

OK, I admit it’s difficult at the moment to retain one’s equanimity when we seem to be living in some dystopian Russian novel what with The Idiot, War and Peace – or was it 1984?. Still, in the grand scheme of things we’re all still breathing, still here, still robust enough to complain and, in a pinch, reach out to friends and family. Which hopefully we still have. After all, a lot of those lost puppies did get found; Timmy did get out of the well; Dorothy did find her way back to Kansas and while we may not all have lived happily ever we read the stories and were hopeful. So hang in there. Eat the butter, have a glass of wine, play some happy music and watch a sunset. Most important: ignore the news.

Universal truth?

The Universe, let’s face it, can be downright annoying. Disagreeable even. Oh sure, every so often we (apparently inaccurately) get to say ‘Karma’s a bitch’ when someone we especially dislike gets his or her comeuppance, but by and large that happens all too rarely and the world is chock full of jerks going along their merry way doing just fine without the Universe getting too bothered. What goes around does not appear to come around, unless it’s just doing a U-turn.

I am reminded of a line from an old essay by columnist and critic John Leonard:

Said the man to the Universe, “Sir, I exist.” “That,’ replied the Universe, “does not instill in me any particular sense of obligation.”

And there’s the rub. The universe carries on, black holes and quasars and pulsars and whatnot out there, a gazillion light years away so we don’t even know they’re there for thousands of years since it takes forever for their light to travel over to us. The Hubble telescope shows us the odd awe inspiring photo of it all going on, Big Bang in the rear view, expanding away. Meanwhile we think we matter somehow – so we create gods and symbols and rituals to reassure ourselves that really there is some point to it all, we just haven’t quite stumbled onto the details yet.

I won’t bother to bring up the lunacy of the world at the moment – you all have access to the same news I do – or gripe in my usual charming fashion about the stupidity of AI or the madness of crowds ploughing buckets of money into said AI. I’ll keep a tight rein on my temper as drivers go nuts – the car ahead of me yesterday signalling right as it then turned left (reminding me of the old Bob Newhart driving instructor bit: Mrs. Webb! Mrs. Webb! SCREECH.  Ah, well, Mrs. Webb, you were in the left lane and you were signalling left so naturally I assumed … ). We won’t even mention the psychopaths who sit on their horn because I seem reluctant to run over the pedestrians in the crosswalk. I know, so gauche of me not to want to murder people.

I’ll simply resort to paraphrasing the immortal words of Monty Python’s Eric Idle, and hope that somewhere in the universe there’s intelligent life.

And take solace in the fact that summer with its incessant heat, forest fire smoke and general chaos is over, fall is here with its soothing, cooling rain and try – try! – to not echo the same shriek as everyone else: November? It’s November already?!

Fat Chance

Yesterday a friend told me that the head of a respected statistics/labour agency in the U.S. had been fired by you-know-who because he didn’t like the numbers she was reporting. This got me to thinking about the role numbers – and data – play in our increasingly  digitalized world. (I have of course ranted on about this before.) Also the extent to which medicine has fallen into this numbers-driven discourse.

Think about it. There you are, wandering about, dancing merrily amid the daffodils, a la Wordsworth, when for some reason it is decreed (by some aspiring vampire) that you need “blood work”. Whereupon you are told, in grave accents, that your cholesterol is somehow off or that you are “pre” diabetic. (There is, incidentally, no such thing. You may as well walk around saying you are pre-ankle fracture or pre-stomach upset since who knows when you might tumble down a staircase, breaking said ankle, or eat a bad oyster.)

At this point you are prey to what some observers call numbers-created disease.

You’re doing fine but your “numbers” don’t match some Utopian ideal. And nowhere are those numbers more quelling than in the dreaded BMI or Body Mass Index measures, telling you that you, your body type, your rounded post-menopausal tummy and pretty much all of you is, well, wrong.

For thousands of years food shortage and malnutrition stalked the human condition and those better able to store calories had a survival advantage. Alas, the fickle finger of fashion moved on and with it our notions of beauty. Old portrait galleries ably demonstrate just how bizarre previous generations defined the fashionable (usually) lady: Elizabethans plucked their hair to give themselves a higher forehead, my grandmother had weird little curls stuck to the side of her face making her look like some kind of demented Clara Bow. Now young women inject poisons into their faces and lips and opt for surgery to look better in selfies.

Never mind that people come in all shapes and sizes, always have, always will.  

So when did it become a federal crime to carry around a few extra kilos?

Thin is in

So far has the pendulum swung away from the older, more zaftig ideal that now it threatens to fall off and hurt something. Being a touch plump now would appear to signal a visible sign of evil intent, with the medical profession (egged on by social media) leading the charge. God help you if you’re fit and fat – une belle fille as my grandmother would have said; the general feeling is that that’s impossible. You simply must have something wrong, even if your numbers are fine. Here, bias trumps evidence.

Who you callin’ tubby? I’m just big boned.

Frankly, to my way of thinking, as we age, carrying some extra weight is A Good Thing: it gives one some reserve. Just like those earlier humans who had an evolutionary advantage. Especially should one have the misfortune to suffer some kind of health problem. (Trust me, the food in most hospitals, not to mention the gulag like care, will peel the pounds faster than you can say Viva Ozempic. And who came up with this diabolical notion to wake you up at 6 .m. to give you drugs? Atilla the Hun?)

This ridiculous obsession with body size has had some dire medical consequences over the years. I recall, back in the days when I was writing my dissertation, the excitement over fenfluoramine a drug which the FDA fast-tracked because it purportedly quickened weight loss. Turned out it also quickened cardiac problems and early death. Oops. It was taken off the market post-haste.

Today the big news on the crazy diet front is Ozempic (semaglutide) and its ilk, magical drugs – or so we’re told – with zero down sides. Say what now?

Abra-cadabra

Back in the 19th century Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich spoke of our burning desire for a “magic bullet”, a drug that could magically cure disease without side effects. At the time the magic elixirs on hand were hawked by con artists in fairs and carnivals, usually a mix of alcohol and some kind of bitters (we tend to believe more in things that taste bad), said to cure ague (chills and fever), boils, inflammation of the lungs (pneumonia) and so on. Of course in the absence of antibiotics and routine vaccines, most people still died of infectious disease.

Now it’s white-coated pseudo-doctors on Tik-Tok promising their version of magic.

And then there’s Ozempic et al. The potion you’re exhorted to ask your overworked, underpaid, impatient doctor about. Touted as solutions to everything from reversing cardiac disease to Alzheimer’s and addiction, the popular press has jumped on the bandwagon full tilt. The bonus? You could be a size 4 by next Tuesday. What could possibly go wrong?

G-u-LP One

This class of drugs is, I grant you, interesting. They’re what’s called glucogen-like peptides (GLP-1), a substance which the cells in your stomach, pancreas, liver, kidneys and pretty much everywhere else secrete when “nutrients are absorbed”. When you eat, in other words. This process converts food into glucose which is the only “fuel” cells can use. (Fat is the only exception.) The problem is that the naturally occurring GLP lasts only minutes then poof, it’s gone. So, drug companies, notably Novo-Nordisk which has been futzing with diabetes drugs for years, have tirelessly worked at making GLP linger in the system. With semaglutide (circa 2005) they finally succeeded, as a once-a-week injection that the FDA approved in 2017 or thereabouts for Type 2 diabetes (T2D). It is now, conveniently, also available as a pill.

In the abstract, for people with T2D this could be useful as in these folks the uptake of glucose is impaired. Often, people with T2D do make insulin but for some reason it’s ineffective so there’s a lot of free-floating glucose on board. Which is why their glucose levels tend to be high. This class of drugs assist in the uptake of that glucose, so, for people with T2D in whom older treatments like Metformin have not worked, a trial of one of these drugs could help. Of course that’s assuming they can tolerate the damn thing. So at least here one can see the FDA’s point.

Where this gets seriously muddled is in the weight loss arena. As it turned out, people who took these drugs lost weight. Huzzah cried the peasants. More dancing in the streets.

Of course the reason people lost weight was that they ate less.

GLP slows digestion, which makes you feel full. Rather head-bangingly obvious. It also causes gas, bloating and diarrhea. But, between celebrity endorsements and clever marketing, Ozempic became a household word and around 2021 I think, the FDA approved these meds for weight loss.

The trouble is that people who don’t have T2D probably don’t need all those extra glucogen like peptides floating around since they affect pretty much every major organ. Side effects may include pancreatitis and pancreatic cancer, (fairly major) digestive problems, gall bladder issues and more. In lab studies neck or thyroid tumours have developed. Weirdly, other side effects include depression and suicidal ideation. No matter. According to a breathless article I read in the staid Economist, these drugs are just awesome, probably the most important medical discovery ever. (The author of this piece appears to have forgotten about antibiotics.) Frankly, reading this article rather shocked me – it sounded like a teenager who had just met Taylor Swift.

A big selling point is that GLP-1 is, after all, natural. True, in minute quantities, but in the quantities used, it’s about as natural as purple KoolAid.

Just a reminder, moreover, that snake venom and cyanide are also “natural”. Natural does not equal safe. I’m old enough to remember when interferon (also a naturally occurring immune substance, a cytokine, that helps white blood cells fight infection) made the cover of TIME. Similarly breathless comments were made about interferon’s potential to cure cancer and all other dire diseases. (Maybe even my bad mood.) Then, gosh, it turned out that in high quantities interferon destroyed vital organs and could kill the patient. Anyone hear about the magical properties of those interferons recently? Or the equally “natural” interleukins which followed some years later? Didn’t think so. 

But we love magic, especially a one-size-fits-all diet aid, and drug companies are only too happy to encourage us in our delusions. I had the devil of a time, researching this, finding any journal articles that were not drug company funded or drug company adjacent. “Funded by an unrestricted grant from company X” was pretty much everywhere. I did find bits of evidence on side effects and people relating their issues with pancreatitis, serious gastric disorders, even psychiatric problems but very little in the literature. That alone makes me suspicious. Besides, I don’t tend to like new drugs; call me cynical but I prefer older drugs that you know aren’t going to kill you, at least not straight away.

As with health in general, there are complex and overlapping factors affecting body shape and size. Genetics, hormones, metabolism, age, lifestyle, muscle mass, activity level, etc., etc. And it’s not as clear-cut as calories in/calories out, that lovely mechanistic algorithm we’ve created because it’s idiot proof.

Frankly, I’d rather be a tad rounder and healthy than skinny and sick.

Everything from our impoverished food supply and poverty itself along with pollution, plastics and factory food also play a part but getting a handle on these overlapping, interdisciplinary issues is difficult. Much more amusing to believe Ozempic is the answer.

Except now, as always, I’ve forgotten the question.

Annoy me hearties

As hiding under the bed, hands over ears, chanting la-la-la at the top of one’s lungs seems impractical, at least in the long term, our options would seem to be somewhat limited. However, on reflection it occurs to me that we should simply bookmark for now what we believed (erroneously) to be reality and change tactics – namely, stop being the annoyees and decide to become the annoyers.

Think about it. For too long we have politely ignored the loud voices, the irritating insistence that we book ahead, take five minutes to fill out that survey, engage in all the tiresome shenanigans corporate America (especially) has subjected us to. We’ve politely sidestepped the backpack pushing against us in the subway, the too-loud music the waiter has no control over at the pub when all we want is a quiet drink, the endless alerts and other intrusions into our lives. And with, er, international relations having become unhinged, our desire to stay informed is now seriously at odds with a natural wish to stay sane.

Like Schroedinger’s cat, better to focus on revenge:

(Yes boys and girls, the best humour always will have some science.)*

So, thinking ahead here, rather than just seethe quietly, it may be time to start making more noise, annoying the world as much as it has annoyed us. I’m not totally sure how to go about it but oh, I don’t know. Write letters. Rant at strangers (the horrid ones, not the nice people). Write reasonable comments in response to irritating social media posts. Stick post-its on anything poorly written. Insist they turn the music down in the restaurant. Threaten them with a bad Yelp review. Turn up the Mozart. Nitpick about grammar. Sing O Canada on a whim. Throw out your arms to remind the world, which has been pushing its way in, that you are reclaiming your personal space. What the heck, elbows out. Remind the world that you’re tired of its nonsense and you won’t take it any more.

(OK, maybe you have to take some of it but dammit, you’re not going to go quietly.)

*I apologize for not giving credit to the person who created this but it was sent to me as is and it was simply too good not to share.

The relentless pursuit of upgrade

“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice there is.” Jan van de Snepscheut

Now there’s a quote – and an axiom – I like. Simple, elegant, clear. Since, as we all know, the abstract rarely matches reality and New and Improved hardly ever is. (Of course by the same token in the abstract I should be doing something productive right now, not complaining about how life doesn’t live up to its billing.)

(Camptown Races) Doo-da, doo-da ..

Take that doo-dad you got the other day where the pictogram assures you only the most minor of assembly is required. Any idiot could do it. Just snap the plastic bit into the slit and the device (e.g., the tower fan I bought a while back) will be done – and Bob’s your uncle.  Or, these days, possibly your aunt.

In actual fact you end up cutting your finger on the corner of said plastic bit, getting blood all over everything, and some tiny sliver chips off. So, the fan that was supposed to, er, tower, tilts ever so slightly to the left. Nobody, you assure yourself, will notice this. Actually, every single person who walks into the room asks you why your fan is crooked.

Then there’s life itself. At 2 a.m. as you brood, darkly, about All There Is To do, it seems like simplicity itself to get organized: just make a few calls, send a couple of emails, clear the deck. Desk.

In reality it’s a long afternoon of frustration. The person you need to contact is away or she’s ignoring you because your business really isn’t all that important to them (the automated message lies). Or, for some perverse reason, even if you do connect she can’t or won’t help; it’s above her pay grade. Why don’t you download the app? (You’d think you were applying to MI6, not trying to update some stupid loyalty card.)

In the abstract the remote-controlled blinds would, well, work with the remote. The show you’re streaming wouldn’t freeze in mid-sentence. The audio on your stupid smart TV wouldn’t die each time you switched between Prime and the sci-fi channel and the snazzy cable upgrade that was supposed to translate into greater speed and much enchantment wouldn’t fade to black and require a reboot every five minutes.

But we’re all convinced that newer is better in our relentless pursuit of the upgrade: personal, technological, professional.

In the medical sphere the consequences can be more dire since, in the immortal words of Monty Python, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Oops, I mean the side effects. When they tell you this or that surgery, cataracts, say, are 90% effective you never think you could be one of the unlucky ones. When they assure you those preventive measures you should absolutely take (mammograms, PSA tests, colonoscopies, a daily statin) are low risk you never realized “risk: means something entirely different to the people not doing those tests or taking the drugs. For them, “low” is defined in abstract, statistical terms borrowed from insurance.. Better with cargo ships than people.

“Know myself? If I knew myself I’d run away.” Goethe

The world, in other words, tells us one thing about itself when really it’s nothing of the sort.

In Socratic terms if it tried to know itself it would think of itself as a peacock with a wing span revealing a bright fan of gorgeous colours when in fact it’s a fat, ugly pigeon. Nothing wrong with pigeons mind you. I rather like them; I’ll share my lunch with a pigeon if one if it happens to cross my path when I dine al fresco (OK, as I grab a sandwich as I race from one place to another). But peacocks they ain’t. On the other hand, peacocks are mean, a bit like Canada geese, and to be honest I’m a little scared of them.

So perhaps, to retain our sanity, we should all be giving the abstract – like the geese – a wide berth. Take the win where we can. Be happy when we open a bottle of wine without the cork breaking. When we do put together some device without chipping off some spare bit. Do a happy dance when we do get through to a person who is friendly and helpful. And try to recall those times more often versus simply brooding on the bad. (“Oh yeah?” retort the Absinthe Drinkers.)

 

“Confidence and hope,” said Galen, does “more good than physic.” Not quite sure what “physic” means but I suspect it has something to do with poking and prodding. Which only ends up pushing the cork even farther into the wine.

And nobody likes corked wine.

(Oh go on. Click on the doo-da link.)

 

 

Coming soon: Robot Overlords, Sentient AI and more

To paraphrase Paul Fussell, progress is just one damn thing after another. And frankly, I want out. This 21st century is turning out to be tiresome, troublesome and exhausting. So far there’s nothing cool, like transporters; there’s no warp drive, no Star Fleet, and to date (to my everlasting disappointment) no Klingon has attacked me, batleth in hand, for insulting their warrior honour. No fun stuff in other words.

(OK, I’ll admit smartphones can be cool and damn useful at times but they’re tools, people, not a substitute for real life.)

The current threat looming (Covid having been declared null and void by the WHO*) is Artificial Intelligence (AI) which, we are told, is becoming too smart for its own good and will soon outsmart humans. Then again, given some of the humans I’ve met along the way that wouldn’t be difficult.

Soon, apparently, we will all be toiling for our robot overlords. (Of course what a sentient AI would want other than reams of power which surely we could, er, unplug, is beyond me. I mean, think about it. No matter how smart AI gets, it’s still a machine and you can cut the cord – literally. Destroy those banks of power-eating computers feeding it.)

Clichés R Us

Now there’s a marvelous cliché: robot overlords. I like it because it’s kind of funny and reminiscent of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. But really the phrase is a rather flippant way of shifting the argument away from what seems to me to be a very real problem: the increasing digitalization of daily life. Where we spend half our time trying to fix problems we had no hand in creating because some drop down menu or web site or app refused to work.

All this talk of scary-boo AI seems to me to have become the worst kind of cliché, one that obscures how our lives have become more complicated and more frustrating as apps and bots and cyber-whatsits take over.

The trouble with clichés, as Alain de Botton wrote in How Proust Can Change Your Life, is not that they are wrong or contain false ideas but more that they are “superficial articulations of good ones”. Cliches are oversimplifications that become so commonplace we stop noticing the more serious subtext. (This is rife in medicine where metaphors such as talk of “replacing” organs through transplants makes people believe it’s akin to changing the oil filter in your car. Or whatever it is EV’s have these days that needs replacing.)

The real trouble isn’t the evil AI looming but the stupid ones already here.

From apps to those ubiquitous bar-code thingummies you’re supposed to photograph and zip to some web site or menu or what-have-you, we’ve all gone digital mad. (I use the term “we” loosely. Most of us had nothing to do with it.) Ably accelerated by the Covid fears of the last years (Me? Touch a paper menu full of “germs”? Are you nuts?! We could all die!) suddenly everything from a price list to an airline ticket is only accessible via smartphone. This not only excludes anyone without one – or anyone with a disability which precludes their using one – but also cuts back on staff, you know, the humans who could answer a question in twelve seconds whereas poking at a screen takes that many minutes. It’s also daft, oftentimes irritating as hell and prone to disruption (which you blame on your ineptitude).

Case in point. My bank card got eaten by an ATM on foreign shores not long ago. I got the card back, not without some difficulty and a fair amount of anxiety, but then it turned out the money I never took out before the machine ate my card had been debited from my account. Calling the bank which now has a single phone number for everything proved, ah, challenging. After I pressed umpteen numbers, I was then greeted by a nauseatingly cheery cyber voice, insisting I tell it what my problem was so it could put me through to the correct agent, since merely saying “agent” or “representative” or “f-ing human” proved pointless. Every combination of words I tried failed – problem with international debit, ATM ate my card but the money was withdrawn – or resulted in a three minute explanation of how to do a debit. Then, click, the cheery bot hung up on me.

When I finally got through to an actual human (after my fifth call – don’t ask me how as it remains a deep dark mystery) things went pretty smoothly and as far as I know the problem is on its way to being solved. Well at least I hope it will; who knows what could happen down the road. I did ask the agent whether furious clients yelled at him because they were so angry at the bot and he just sighed and said, “Don’t get me started.”

So the poor human gets the ire that should be directed at the bot, which doesn’t care because it is not, at least so far, sentient.

Then there are apps, which is where you do not want to get me started. Every store you’ve stepped into, every coffee shop you’ve ever frequented, every search for some random item on the internet results in an invitation to download their app. Parking on a Vancouver city street now requires an app if you have the misfortune to park next to an older meter without change in your pocket.

I will not bore you with details, suffice it to say, in a moment of weakness, I actually thought I might download the parking app. (In my defense it was a seriously good parking space.) After I had agreed to let them share my personal information with Lucifer et al there was some kind of zig-zag and suddenly I was being told I could download Movies! Music! TV shows! Er, excuse me? How did “Vancouver City Parking” result in entertainment? Nothing entertaining about parking in Vancouver, trust me. So there I stood, in a rather chilly wind, futzing with phone. And since the only actual humans in the parking world these days are the ones lurking, waiting to give you a ticket ten seconds after your time has expired, I gave up and moved the car.

(You have, by the bye, not lived until you’ve watched some poor tourist in a rented vehicle attempt to figure out Vancouver parking. I watched an older gentleman dart back and forth between their back license plate while his wife, in the driver’s seat, pushed buttons as she glared at her phone.)

Ironically, experts tell us to be cautious with apps as sharing all that private information puts us at risk.

Sentient AI? Oh please. How much worse could that be? I guess we could learn some new and interesting curse words along the way – or meet HAL – but for now it’s just dumb and dumber bots and creepy internet ads that stalk you wherever you go.

As far as I’m concerned you can bring on those robot overlords. They can’t be any worse than the corporate ones we have now.

 

* Though I did read in the paper that some new variant of Covid, nicknamed Arcturus, is lurking out there. This apparently can cause pink eye (conjunctivitis). Um, last I heard, pink eye was bacterial. Wash your hands, don’t touch your eyes, and, if you really do get conjunctivitis, there are over-the-counter drops that will get rid of it in a few days. Stop fretting.

 

 

And the beat goes on

“Time, said Heraclitis, is like a river that flows endlessly through the universe; you cannot step into the same river twice.”

Darn good thing too – can’t think of anyone who’d want a repeat of the last few years. Like most people I rather went through the last years in a bit of a daze, but here we are, still standing. Or lurching as the case may be.

Nonetheless I suspect there were those who rather enjoyed themselves (oh, you know, virologists, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, Pfizer…).

OK, maybe on an individual level it was somewhat subconscious but let’s face it, these people are human and it probably was a bit of a treat having their every utterance and half baked hypothesis treated with reverence and quoted on the news. This may explain why there’s plans afoot looking forward to the next great plague. We barely made it past the oh-no-we’re-all-going-to-die stage (not to mention monkeypox looming), masks, social distancing, general gloom and doom, and now here’s Bill Gates with a Cunning Plan for Covid 2.0. He’s written a book, suggesting an international body with the clever acronym GERM (Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization), on stand by, ready to leap in when there’s even a hint of some killer microbe. The cost? A scant $1 billion/year. Here’s a thought, Bill. Why don’t you take a course on basic physiology. I’m sure they’d let you audit and maybe then you’d stop thinking about disease in binary, tech terms. To paraphrase Larry Brilliant, one of the epidemiologists who helped to eradicate smallpox, outbreaks are part of nature and inevitable but the human response, the “pandemic” part, is optional. There are choices to be made in terms of how we react, and, gosh, wouldn’t it have been great if some better decisions had been made..

Perhaps the part that upset me the most was the mental health aspect as all manner of folks who had been skirting on the edge but were able to manage with their normal routines in place were jolted out of that state over the last years and are now slipping into the abyss of behaviourial, cognitive and what we now call neuro, er, diverse problems.

Broken China

Then there’s China, who’s decided on a “zero covid” policy. It would seem head-smackingly obvious that a virus would be, er, less susceptible to a diktat from Mr. Xi than the beleaguered citizens of Shanghai, under house arrest/lockdown for so many months, but I suppose the Chinese Communist Party assumes what they say goes, everywhere in the micro- and macro-universe. The mind boggles.

Unsurprisingly, mental health issues in China, like everywhere, have skyrocketed – even though China doesn’t really acknowledge their existence. Perhaps it’s a holdover from Mao’s day when dissidents were confined for psychiatric “care” (though apparently that still happens). Depression and suicide are on the rise. Well, as they are everywhere. You can only amp up stress and anxiety levels so long before there are consequences.

 

Stressed? Who you callin’ stressed?

Hypervigilant Hypochondriacs

Meanwhile, our understanding of how bodies work continues to deteriorate, ably aided by corporations pushing the idea that health is really the sum of its (measurable) parts which we can follow, eagle-eyed, with wearable devices. There is, after all, money to be made. So beady little tech eyes are now turned to what has been termed the “quantitative patient”.

And we’re merrily going along with this, loving our Apple watches and FitBits and apps. Improvements in wireless and other technologies are poised to track your every heartbeat and more – so you can obsess not just about the number of steps you took but your sleep, glucose levels, whatever else they can think of to measure. As if Dr. Google weren’t bad enough, now we can be hypervigilant hypochondriacs 24/7.

We used to refer to these measures as “objective” health (versus “subjective”, which is how you actually feel) but this is taking every breath, hiccup and heartbeat to a whole new level. And I would remind you that the algorithms tracking these rely on large banks of energy-devouring servers, adding to climate change as you compare yourself to some mythical standard.

The Minotaur maybe?

Inevitably it will be the young and tech savvy, those least likely to suffer from anything dire, who will be the ones goimg nuts over this medical micromanaging – and they will be the ones most likely to go crazy when their heart skips a beat or their REM sleep doesn’t conform to some average. Given how dynamic physiology is, not to mention self regulating, knowing this minutae will probably only serve to increase anxiety, not health. After all, everything from stress to food to falling in love affects these mechanistic medical benchmarks.

Soooooo … gazing into my crystal ball I see nervous zombies rising through the mist, upset and worried because their watch told them something was abnormal. I observe health care systems overwhelmed by ever younger people panicked by shrill apps. Social skills further eroded as our phones not only remind us there’s an update on Twitter but that our pulse was a touch thready for 4.3 seconds. Then the doctor-du-jour on some telehealth app will try to reassure us we won’t be dead by next Tuesday.

Julie, don’t go

I don’t suppose the Wayne and Shuster skits would do too well these days; they’re awfully clever and literary. But they still make me laugh. One of the best was the Julius Caesar sketch, with Caesar’s wife repeating, mournfully, that she warned him not to go out on the Ides of March. “Julie, I said, Julie don’t go.” But did he listen? Of course not. By the same token I feel like that sometimes, constantly telling people not to check Dr. Google and go down that rabbit hole of medical misinformation. But do they listen? Of course not. There’s always something going on in that Forum.

To illustrate the point, true story. Big-wig American CEO, recently retired, with excellent insurance, feels a twinge in his left arm. Naturally races to the internet and realizes he must be having a heart attack, and must run, not walk, to the ER. Hours or possibly days at the hospital where he’s probed and poked, scanned and tested and then it turns out it wasn’t his heart at all. He had recently taken up gardening (repeat, retirement) and overdid things a bit, straining his left arm and shoulder. Oops.

So you see, Virginia, sometimes there is no sanity clause.

Finally

No matter how bad things got the vast majority of us are still here. Statistically, as always, those who did poorly with covid were the poor, the frail, the elderly, the dispossessed; those without access to clean food and water, health care or care in general. The differences between areas that locked down hard (like California) and those that did not (Florida) in terms of covid cases or deaths were insignificant. So much as I hate to say I told you so (OK, I lie, I love it), much of our general freakout and fighting about masks and proximity was misplaced. Basic care and common sense measures would have sufficed. Protecting the most vulnerable. How things might have played out without the panic of the last few years is not knowable; suffice it to say that the current global economic disruption(s) could have been averted, at least somewhat, had saner heads prevailed. Risk, alas, continues to be misunderstood even as the vast majority of us live longer, healthier lives than any other cohort in history.

So, in closing, I leave you with the mental picture of a graphic I recently saw. It read, what’s important to remember is not whether the glass is half full or half empty but that the glass can be refilled. Next to the glass: a bottle of wine.

Cheers.

 

 

 

 

 

Masquerade

Chicken Little and Henny Penny were off on a quest: to terrify everyone and tell them the sky was falling. Close to a year later it would seem they succeeded and everyone is indeed scared witless. As the world moves in slow motion Christmas appears to have been cancelled, adding to the general gloom.

Never mind that 1.5 million people die each year of TB or that 300,000 people (mostly children) die of malaria. And some 55+ million more die annually of various and sundry causes which, on a planet with close to eight billion people, is par for the course. Honestly, you’d think that without covid nobody ever died.

For now the burning question is whether that godforsaken mask is the holy grail or a fiendish mind control plot.

A friend tells me that apparently it is illegal to enter a bank wearing a mask. Implication is that you’re a nefarious miscreant. (Come to think of it, this would be the perfect time for a heist; just melt into the masked crowd with your loot.)

Stop the world I want to get off

As always, health discourse has gone reductio ad absurdum, pared down to a basic, binary level – a topic I have whinged on about at length. In one corner the coronavirus, crowned headband and mean little eyes; at the other, the economy, pale, with quavery legs, propped up by government handouts.

Weirdly, nobody seems to notice or care that the state of the economy impacts heavily on health. It’s not a zero sum game. Stress, especially that of not knowing whether you’ll have enough money to feed your family, is especially bad for health, as is isolation and locking ourselves away from anything makes life worth living like social contact. Seeing friends and family. Art. Music. Dance. Theatre. Travel.

Immunologically, the organism, the person matters, not that you’d know it these days. You don’t just get sick because you’re exposed to a pathogen, whether that’s covid or TB. You get sick when your immune system reacts to said pathogen. In the dry, wry words of an old epidemiology text, the virus (or bacterium) is necessary but not sufficient. In other words, the TB bacterium must be present if you have TB, but simply having the tuberculosis bacterium does not mean you have TB.

With any kind of testing that becomes obvious; all sorts of people harbour microbes they never knew they had. My mother never had chicken pox but clearly had been exposed since later in life she developed shingles (when she was taking immune suppressants). Chicken pox’s revenge as one nurse called it.

The dratted virus isn’t some poison perfume chalice, the mere whiff of which can fell anyone walking by. But hey, who cares about science when you can post scolding messages on Facebook?

The big news this week is the vaccine. And how it will be distributed. Not much analysis of the actual mRNA vaccine that frankly spooks the hell out of me. Makes sense in the abstract but real people are adaptive, dynamic physiologic systems: neurologic, immunologic, endocrine etc etc. Altering the genetics of a cell: well, no reset button there. I truly hope there are no negative consequences six months, two years, down the road. What I read, even when it tries to be reassuring is awfully vague.

[And always, along the same binary lines – if you discuss vaccines in anything but glowing terms well, clearly you’re one of them lunatic anti-vaxxers. No grey in this discourse. ]

We are the Borg. Resistance is futile. 

What’s up doc?

I was asked an intriguing question a while back: if we infect others with a cold or flu through coughs and sneezes, how is it possible to transmit a virus when we are asymptomatic (or presymptomatic) and not coughing/sneezing? I had taken it on faith that one could transmit a virus before getting sick. So I tried to find out.

Turns out it there’s a process called viral shedding.

When you have been exposed to a virus and it is attempting to take hold (but your immune system is pushing back), the virus works its way into a cell, often killing it (apoptosis). And  miniscule bits of the virus can shed a bit and get into your system. Possible but highly improbable in these socially distanced times. Reminder: even the symptoms of a cold result from the immune system’s reaction to the virus, not from the virus

So, if you have somehow been exposed to a virus and it has somehow entered your system, this shedding might get passed along if you got seriously close to another person and get these shreds into their eyes or mouth. Bearing in mind that these specks of virus aren’t especially numerous. That’s a lot of ifs. This, incidentally, explains why genital herpes or HIV can be transmitted through, er, bodily fluids, even when the person is asymptomatic. It’s more complicated with a respiratory virus,  particularly since we have this enormous immune organ called the skin protecting us.

But, the numbers are rising, I hear you cry. Surely that’s worrisome.

Maybe. Numbers alone can’t tell a story. For instance, what irks me immensely is the term “case” as I can’t bloody tell whether we’re talking about people who have tested positive or people who are actually sick. (Different groups use the term differently.) Particularly since the majority of people who get sick recover. With more testing it stands to reason that more people will test positive, therefore becoming a “case’. (And do not get me started on test accuracy – as no test is fully accurate.) But with language like “cases surging” we lose all nuance.

It’s year end, furthermore, by which time statistics would, under normal circumstances, have recorded some 56+ million deaths globally from various and sundry causes. As with most things, most at risk are the poor, the dispossessed, the fragile, the elderly. Nothing new there.

So, yes, this appears to be a bad flu but keeping one’s distance and keeping your hands clean should keep the worst of it at bay. Have there been massive numbers of excess deaths? I’m not sure. I suspect not but honestly, life’s too short to try and dig up those statistics that nobody’s keen to publicize.

In any event, when it’s cold more people get colds and flu. We just don’t usually keep track of them with such eagle-eyed negativity.

Alas what is on the rise, along with the freakout factor, is stress, depression, anxiety, gloom. Especially hard hit are those living alone, especially the elderly, cut off from  human contact. Ah, just asking: did anyone actually ask these individuals what they wanted? Guess not.

Lost in the mist of misinformation is the dynamic nature of organisms, viral and human. Forgotten is immunologic adaptation. Things evolve. Long before there was a vaccine for polio or smallpox the incidence of those diseases was well on the wane. I hate using the term “herd immunity” as it sounds more like animal husbandry but it really is a thing. Places where there were outbreaks last spring are now virtually covid free (e.g., Lombardy in northern Italy). Immunity is not static.

Post viral stupid pills

Now I read that – gak! – post covid complications seem to happen in people who’ve recovered, particularly those who were in hospital. Several months later these individuals are not back to “normal”.

Really? A bad viral infection didn’t totally clear in a few months? Shocker. Um, ever hear the term “post viral fatigue” (or post viral syndrome). There are always individual differences but for many people recovery post infection is slow. This isn’t new and scary. We used to call it life.

Bodies aren’t high tech devices you can reboot. Homeostasis takes times.

Yup. Stupid pills. It took over six months for some genius to figure out that in those people with covid who had had an inflammatory over-reaction steroids might help. We’ve known for over 100 years that steroids reduce inflammation but  it didn’t occur to anyone to give dying patients prednisone or something along those lines, to reduce the inflammation that was killing them? (See what I mean when I say the immune system appears to have disappeared in this virus discourse altogether.) Yes, I get that steroids aren’t good for an infection – but see “dying” line above. Still, best not to stress about all this. Stress is really bad for immunity – and wearing that damn mask is stressful enough.

What I will not do is let the buk-buk-buking of those Chicken Littles get me down. There have always been viruses, some worse than others, this too shall pass. In any event, I am bored with this particular fairy tale. So my new hero is Bugs Bunny and like him I plan to munch on carrots, sing my songs and bounce along being as silly as I can.  Just because the world’s gone nuts is no reason to follow suit. B-dda B-dda B-daa.

That’s all folks.

 

Coronavirus Blues

So here we are, essentially still in thrall to a coronavirus – with horrid terms like “social distancing” and “lockdown” having worked their way into the lexicon even as we are inundated with nauseating corporate platitudes along the lines of “we’re all in this together”. Then there’s “Zoom fatigue” and “brain fog”, giving us all an excuse to whinge about how tired we are. Which I, personally, enjoy a great deal as it gives me an excellent excuse not to do the things I don’t want to do.

Inevitably, as with most things health related, discourse has descended into a kind of bipolar idiocy: either you’re a virtuous human being who defers to “scientists” (who these people are or what their expertise is doesn’t seem to factor in), keeps their distance (leaping ostentatiously away if anyone gets anywhere close), dutifully wears a mask (even in the car, alone) – or you’re a conspiracy theory nutter roaming the streets and howling at the moon.

This, of course, isn’t new but it gained traction with social media some decade or so ago when anybody, anywhere, could find like-minded lunatics instantaneously. So discourse on anything even marginally ambiguous (which anything scientific inevitably is) now descends into the subtle dynamics of a nursery school spat: T’is! T’isn’t. T’is too! There are only two settings, right or wrong. (By the way, if you learned everything you needed to know in kindergarten, you’re an idiot. Get your GED.)

Trouble is, while binary codes seem to work OK in the digital world, they don’t work so well in the real one. And science, especially, doesn’t lend itself to this kind of thinking.

Computer language(s) rule?

Science isn’t some sort of “amorphous blob” (to quote British physicist Brian Cox, quoted in the BMJ on line). Science is dynamic, self-questioning and oftentimes wrong; it’s a method designed to grope for some measure of truth via empiricism.

With time, as the concepts become more refined, so do the answers. Which is how we moved from the notion of “miasmas” of bad air in sick rooms causing infectious disease to an understanding of microbes and germ theory. An understanding that continues to evolve. The development of better microscopes and laboratory techniques played a part as well, not to mention keen thinking by the likes of Pasteur and Koch. Later, a happy lab accident led to antibiotics and this daft idea we’ve formulated as a result that there’s a pill for every ill.

Science is not dogma and a great many hypotheses fall by the wayside. Just check the sheer number of un-reproduceable results for, say, genetics, if you don’t believe me. (One biotech company, Amigen, hoping to develop a miracle cancer drug, tried to replicate 53 “landmark” genetic studies – of which they were only able to replicate six. And they included the original researchers. But those other 47 trials undoubtedly made headlines in their day.)

The real strength of science is that it is self-correcting: it is not a religion or a deity or the final word.

By last March, alas, between the media shrieking blue bloody murder and epidemiologists insisting we were all going to die, it all built up to a crescendo of panic which has yet to subside. The zombie apocalypse would be upon us any minute. (Never mind that there aren’t a lot of good brains around these days for those poor zombies to eat.)

Now, months later, it seems to me, governments and policy wonks, epidemiologists and virologists, having scared the living daylights out of everyone, are a tad unclear as to what to do next. We’re tip-toeing into phase 3, with stores and such re-opening, but nobody’s all that clear about how close to get to that plexiglass or how essential those masks really are. I detect a hint of disquiet as the economy tanks and people are pushed into poverty all over the world, which every gibbon knows is what’s really bad for health.

Trouble is, once you’ve scared everyone half to death un-scaring them isn’t especially easy.

Freakout

For my part, I have wearily realized that this pandemic business was inevitable. The world was waiting for a pandemic, it was wanting a pandemic – and a pandemic is what it got. Now we’re stuck with the dregs and the aftermath.

There have been rumblings about the Next Great Plague for decades. There was SARS in 2003 (where under a thousand people died), then H1N1 (but then there was a vaccine) and its variants some years later. Each time the so called experts began their siren song, warning us that any second now, the plague was upon us.

It certainly didn’t help that popular culture, films, TV shows, have gone on incessantly about the dangers of microbes, be it bioterrorism, laboratory mismanagement or just bad luck. Every other day some actor strode about in in some show, unrecognizeable in a HazMat suit, looking suitably grave – even as virologists threatened us with the next “war” against some killer pathogen. (I recall a profile of some chap “hunting” viruses, profiled in The New Yorker, a la Indiana Jones, with your man chasing the virus that was going to kill us all.)

In short, we were primed.

The 1918 flu always held up as a template – millions dead and pandemonium in the streets, and boy will you be sorry you didn’t listen. Never mind that in 1918 they barely understood antisepsis, never mind antibiotics. Not to mention that pesky war to end all wars.

This time it took. First off there was that term, “coronavirus”: so easy to pronounce. (Quick reminder: the common cold is a coronavirus.) Plus, it originated in China, a country many of us have reservations about. Its genome was sequenced there making the provenance of this “novel” virus suitably creepy. At first it may even have seemed exciting, in a horror-movie sort of way. People do love to be scared, after all. And the word “pandemic”. So scary. Boo.

After that it took on a life of its own – and nobody took a breath, stopped to consider how focusing solely on a virus, using the most primitive medical model, could have dire, lateral, contextual consequences. Contrary to the idiocies posted on Facebook and its ilk, the reality of health is that it is not an either/or, zero sum game. Either we all wear our masks and keep our distance or everybody dies. Dodge any other human within several metres or the virus “wins”. Military metaphors sunk so deep within public health discourse and public consciousness we don’t even see they’re there. Just ignore the basic immunologic aspect: virus + organism could = disease. It’s not a given. Not just about the virus but the host. And not everyone with a virus will react to said virus.

People live in the real world, with real lives, and this freakout has had real consequences for work, housing, education, and health – which is about far more than an immune response to a virus. It was as though we forgot, watching the numbers rising at the edge of the screen that we all die, with or without a virus. In 2018 according to the World Economic Forum some 56 million people died. No coronavirus then, just, well, life. And flu and TB and a myriad other things. All made worse by deprivation and poverty and hopelessness and stress and all those other things.

To paraphrase Norman Bethune, there are two kinds of tuberculosis. The rich man’s TB and the poor man’s TB. The rich man gets better, the poor one dies. As we saw with this virus. The worse afflicted – other than the few whose immune systems responded with that oft-mentioned cytokine storm – were the poor, the marginalized, the malnourished, the warehoused. Sorry, but camping out at your holiday cottage, complaining of Zoom fatigue as you do your work on line, is not the same thing as losing the one (or three) poorly paid jobs you have which is all that’s keeping your family fed and housed. In the U.S. or Bangladesh.

Nobody likes to talk about the larger context; too complicated, so muddled, damn ambiguous, non-linear. Can’t be neatly graphed or displayed in bright colours. It isn’t something an infectious disease expert or virologist really knows much (or cares) about. It became about the virus; never mind the consequences of shutting it all down or how this will affect communities, cities, families, children.

Keeping it clean

Perhaps the one (semi) positive note I can see in all this is that perhaps some basics around hygiene we’ve appeared to have forgotten will get some attention. You know, things like keeping hospitals and schools and busses clean. Maybe we’ll remember that it’s a good idea to wash our hands more. Or hey, we could consider paying the people who take care of the elderly a living wage so they don’t need to work four jobs to make ends meet. Revolutionary concept.

Maybe we can revisit this notion that buildings need to be hermetically sealed, with no windows that open, giving some of us sick headaches. Or stop already with those horrid digital faucets that spurt water at random. That last one comes from personal experience (but I’m not bitter) from the times I tried to get my hands clean enough to take my contacts out on campus. But even though I brought a nail brush and soap from home, it never worked. I could never get enough water to scrub my hands properly. (Old joke: how do you know someone’s had to use a hand dryer in the washroom? Their trousers are wet.)

There’s a Danger Lurk!

There is simply no way to do away with risk. Risk is all around us. Nothing is 100% safe. Not crossing the street, or going to the dentist; no medical treatment, no drug, no surgery, nothing. It’s a risk to sit too much, stand too much; exercise too much, exercise too little.  You get my drift. (Incidentally, even though everybody’s all worried about a virus doesn’t mean bacteria aren’t still out there too.)

So here we are, singing the coronavirus blues, trying to figure out who decides what this “new normal” is, and watching people pander to their OCD tendencies, get all worked up about masks and otherwise indulge their inner Stasi. Hoping, I guess, that virtue trumps risk.

Trouble is, as the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, who was pilloried for writing about the plight of the Rohingya in the age of coronavirus, has rightly said, our response to this virus has been more pathological than the virus itself. Aptly, he quotes Virchow: “An epidemic is a social phenomenon comprised of some medical aspects.” Not the other way round.

 

 

There ain’t no Sanity Clause

So, here we are, in the throes of insanity as Covid-whatsit (I think the virus may have reached the age of majority right about now) accompanied by what I read is panic buying of toilet paper and Lysol wipes and now food. Various grocery store shelves bare. Then there’s the conflation of Corona beer with the corona virus. The mind boggles.

Incidentally, “corona”, in viral terms, simply refers to the shape of the virus, which looks a bit like a crown – it isn’t anything especially dire. The common cold is a coronavirus.

The other day I dashed into Canadian Tire and whatever it was I was trying to find (and didn’t) was right next to a large display of masks. Now these weren’t those little white medical ones you see everybody wearing (which means you can’t understand a damn thing they say, their voices being muffled and all) but, well, closest I’ve ever seen to these are from old movies from around 1920, those weird gas masks they had to protect against chemical warfare. The ones that made wearers look like aliens – and not the nice friendly kind either. Good grief. It’s come to this. Browbeating some poor little Somali kid who works at Canadian Tire because the store’s run out of surgical masks that won’t protect anybody from anything.

Marx Brothers, here we come.

 

[From the 1935 movie, A Night at the Opera, where Groucho attempts to explain a business contract to Chico, who rightly points out there ain’t no sanity clause.]

Phantom of the Opera?

So, in response to one of the questions I get asked: will a mask help? No it will not. Surgeons wear the damn things to protect the patient they’ve just cut open (the skin, as you might recall, is our largest organ and keeps us safe from marauding germs pretty much all the time) and don’t want to get the bacteria from their mouths and noses into the patient who’s just been cut open. Otherwise, your grubby fingers on that mask will probably do more harm than good. Try not to touch your eyes. If you don’t want to listen to me, listen to this York University prof. 

The sky was falling with SARS (it didn’t – 800 people died). World was ending with H1N1. Didn’t happen. As for the Spanish flu, I’ve already told you times were different in 1918. And that was ten years ago.

What perturbs me somewhat is that there are all these experts out there, expounding, yet nobody really explains what a virus is or how it works. Because without a host organism, in this case you, a virus is just a harmless little chunk of protein.

A bit like a SIM card sitting on your desk. Useless. Until it’s inserted into that phone, it’s just a chunk of useless metal. Viruses are like that.

Immunology 101

Viruses are small. Very very small. Somewhere between 20 and 250 nanometers in diameter. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. I have no metaphor to help you visualize this. Try to think of it in terms of billionaires or something.

Viruses were discovered, or rather deduced, in 1886 by two different scientists in two different parts of the world, when something was found to infect tobacco plants that didn’t seem to be bacteria, since those had been filtered out. (Bacteria are some 100 times larger than viruses which is why they were observed long before, in the 1600’s.) Nobody actually saw a virus until the 1930’s when viruses finally became visible with the electron microscope.

[Officially the first microscope was developed by the Dutch draper van Leeuwenhoek who observed what he called “small animals” in a droplet of rainwater. Bacteria in other words. Of course van Leeuwenhoek wasn’t always reliable – he maintained he had seen a complete little man, a humuculous, in sperm. Still, the man was brilliant and was the only non-scientist to be invited to join Britain’s prestigious Royal Society.)

Viruses are not cells and aren’t alive, at least not in any conventional sense since they cannot reproduce, grow or metabolize. A virus can only replicate within a living host; it does this by co-opting the host’s cellular genetic “machinery”. So, without a living host, a virus is just a chunk of protein. Analogous to that SIM card sitting on the table.

And it’s not that easy for a virus to gain access to that host since we are all encased in this large immune organ called the skin, which is pretty much impenetrable unless there’s a cut or burn or wound. (That’s why bacteria, which are living cells and can survive on surfaces can infect any part of the skin that is open.)

The skin also contains enzymes like lizozeme (I think I spelled that right) which further repel microbes.

The fact that a virus can only exist within a host cell explains why anti-viral drugs tend to be toxic; anything that kills a virus will also damage the cellular environment, i.e., the host. That’s why antibiotics, that kill self-contained bacteria, work really well and anti-viral drugs do not. Anti-viral drugs like Zithromax tend to be toxic and often don’t work very well. Which is why we haven’t “cured” the common cold.

The odds of your immune system actually responding to a virus are slight if you are a normal healthy human being (since it’s the immune response to the virus that causes symptoms, not the virus itself). True, if you are elderly and/or immune suppressed or ill you are at greater risk. But if you are elderly or sick or undergoing treatment for cancer, well,  you are at risk for all sorts of things.

Damn lies/statistics

I am perplexed as to where these dire statistics that are being hurled about willy nilly are coming from, particularly since hypothesizing about the future is not science, It’s speculation. And that, in turn, is affected by one’s agenda.  After all, if I am trying to convince you of something it is to my advantage to make my point seem as dramatic as possible. Since the people who are putting out these stats have a vested interest in making them sound important  … well, I rest my case.

Has it not crossed anybody’s mind yet that if we were to graph, map or pie-chart the regular flu the numbers would be far, far greater? If we followed normal winter deaths from flu or flu-like illness things each year we’d see the same type of pictures?

Don’t forget keeping us indoors is good for a lot of people, not least those who peddle e-sports and on-line courses and such. Just saying. On the flip side, who will graph and chart the fallout, all those stores and cafes that will have gone out of business, all those people who will have lost their jobs, all the attendant misery this nonsense will end up causing? No, that won’t make the front pages, I guarantee you that.

Knowing how a microbe will behave within a human immune system is .. tricky. To put it mildly. Largely unknowable. Debatable. And it’s not like such predictions were especially accurate with SARS or any other of those pandemics that were going to kill us all.

In any event, this virus doesn’t appear to be especially virulent given the numbers. Yes, the numbers. Think about it. On a planet with 7.7+ billion people (so really close to 8 billion), some 198 thousand are thought to have the virus, of whom close to half have recovered. Some 7900 as of this writing, globally, have died, pretty much half of those in China where the, er, outbreak began and most of the rest in the two hotspots, Italy and Iran. Contrast that to the 1.5 million people who die of TB every year. Or the tens of thousands who die of the regular flu. (The CDC estimates that some 3500 Americans died of the flu in 2017-18.) Never mind poverty and cancer and war and whatnot.

Now I am sorry for those individuals’ families and friends, but for heaven’s sake people. When the weather is cold, people get flu or what’s called flu-like illness. That’s the people who get sick with symptoms they think are the flu but when tested don’t actually have the flu. They’re still sick.

(I suppose someone will respond that the reason these numbers aren’t so bad is because of all the measures taken. Which reminds me of one of those elephant jokes I used to like as a kid. Why do elephants have little red eyes? So they can hide in cherry trees. Have you ever seen an elephant in a cherry tree? No. See how well they hide! You can’t win.)

A foolish consistency, said Emerson, is the hobgoblin of little minds.

In BC,  as of today’s newspaper, four elderly people – in a province with over  3 million people – have died. Again, I’m sorry for their families and friends, but honestly. Does this really warrant panic and hoarding not to mention all the doom and gloom? Serious faces? Empty streets? Good grief. According to Worldometer in  Canada, the total number of cases is well under 600. What’s 600 out of 35 million?  I tried to calculate the percentages in terms of global population but none of my calculators have enough zeroes and then I got confused and gave up. You do the math.

Calm down. And remember that a virus is not a bomb, it’s not anthrax, in and of itself it has no power to do anything. And frankly, this one doesn’t appear to be all the virulent.

Cause of death isn’t as easy to determine as most people think it is. Particularly with those who are older and have several things wrong with them it’s bloody difficult to determine a single cause – which is all the form has room for. The writer Calvin Trillin’s wife died of heart problems some years back; I know this because he wrote a beautifully moving tribute to her. She had had breast cancer some decades earlier; the treatment (radiation notably) badly damaged her heart muscle. So, 20 years later, did she die of heart disease, breast cancer or the treatment for that cancer? See, not so easy.

Um, you needed to be told to wash your hands?!

Yes, wash your hands. Because it’s a good idea generally since the world is full of microbes and if you’re especially tired or sleep deprived or stressed or it’s cold outside and you get gunk on your hands and touch your eyes you could get infected. Or not. Mostly not. Wash your hands not because it will protect you against this apparently killer virus since viruses can’t survive on an inert surface for very long; wash your hands because practicing basic hygiene is something you should just do. Duh.

Here’s a thought. Live a little and splurge on a nail brush. Wet it, run it on the soap, scrub your hands, nails, fingers …  Now you can scratch your eye.

Stop stressing. Turn off the news. The end is not nigh.

And if it is, all the toilet paper in the world won’t save you.

 

 

[Thanks to my friend, science blogger Maryse, www.frogheart.ca, for links and for helping me focus my thinking.]