As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been fascinated by the flu since about 1997, when they first discovered the Asian bird flu. The more I learned about the flu, the more fascinated I became. The Great Influenza of 1918 killed more people than died in battle WWI, WWII, the Korean War, or the Vietnam war: 20 to 100 million people world wide (exact numbers are not known due to the nature of the world in 1918, and the number of populations that were decimated by the flu.

So to start off, what is the flu?

The flu is a virus. There is some debate as to whether viruses are living creatures or not, but the important thing to remember about viruses is that they cannot be killed by antibiotics, and the best way to stop the spread of a virus is through inoculation through a vaccine. (Why hasn’t the government put out a flu vaccine? Because it takes about six months to create the flu vaccines that are given to the general population every fall.)

The debate about viruses stems from the fact that they cannot replicate on their own. If you want more viruses, the virus has to invade another cell, take over that cell, and force that cell to do nothing but make more RNA that makes more viruses. Then like the bad guy in a really bad action movie, the virus “blows up” the cell, releasing more viruses, which then continue the cycle.

A flu virus has two important proteins: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). The hemagglutinin protein allows the virus to invade cells. The neuraminidase protein causes the cell to burst after it’s done the virus’ dirty work of creating more viruses.

But that’s not what makes these two proteins so important–what makes them important is that they stick out from the surface of the virus–this means the white blood cells (the body’s defense system) have a chance of recognizing the virus and destroying it before it can kill the host.

Flu strains are named by those proteins. So when scientists talk about the flu, they’ll talk about the H3N2 strain, the H5N1 strain (the Asian bird flu), or in the case of the current virus, the H1N1 strain.

For the curious, H1N1 is the same strain of flu that went through the world in 1918.

So what does all this mean?

As I said previously, the body (and scientists) recognize flu strains by their H and N proteins. When a stain of flu infects your body, if you are healthy, and if your white blood cells recognize that strain of flu (either as a previous invader or because you were immunized) then your body can resist the infection. If you are unhealthy, or if the strain is one that your body cannot recognize, then you get sick. And you remain sick until your body can recognize the invader and fight it off.

Now if we’ve only discovered a handful of flu strains, then why does the flu come around every year, and why do you get sick more than once with the flu?

This is because there are two types of changes the flu virus makes: drift and shift. Just like everything else in the world, viruses are constantly mutating. A small mutation is called a drift. In drift, there is a small change in either the H or the N proteins. This drift means that you can get the flu every year if you’re unlucky. However, your body is able to fight of the infection relatively quickly, because the mutation is small, and thus similar to earlier versions of the flu.

Shift is a big mutation in the virus. It changes the proteins significantly so that they cannot be recognized by the body. When this happens, the virus becomes deadly, because the body essentially cannot recognize the virus as a familiar invader.

The thing to remember is not to panic and freak out. First and foremost, wash your hands. Thirty seconds with regular soap is what you need to clean your hands. No anti-bacterial soaps, no hand sanitizer. If you’re around someone coughing and sneezing back away quickly and wash your hands. And if YOU feel unwell, do NOT go to work. Do NOT go to school. Do NOT go shopping. Rest and fluids and get to the doctor as soon as you can.

If you have any questions, please ask. I’ll do my best to translate science into plain English.

Recommended reading:
Flu, by Gina Kolata
The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett
The Great Influenza by John Barry
The CDC’s flu website

(Of the three books, Gina Kolata’s book is probably the most accessible. It’s my personal favorite anyway.)

I’ve been fascinated by the flu for years–since 1997 I think, since the bird flu first appeared in Asia. And to be honest, I expected any possible pandemic to come from that direction.

Yet here we are facing a possible swine flu epidemic. Cases are appearing in various spots around the US, so thanks to modern transportation, we have the possibility of a pandemic appearing at a moment’s notice.

Mexico is doing exactly the correct thing, shutting down public events and encouraging people to stay home.

What I have no heard happen yet is a quarantine–but then I have no idea what quarantine laws might exist in Mexico.

There are, however, quarantine laws in the US. Those laws have only been invoked once in recent decades (you all probably remember the case of the guy who had TB who flew to Europe) but are still on the books, and in some states have been updated in recent years.

But I can this epidemic is stopped quickly before such measures need to be considered.

The flu is a fascinating subject, and a subject that should scare people far more than it does. The flu of 1918 killed more people than the Great War.

A flu virus–such as the one in 1918 and possibly like the one were seeing now–becomes dangerous when it starts killing young adults and not just infants and the elderly. From the news reports I’ve heard, that seems to be precisely what this flu is doing, which is what makes the virus so frightening. It seems to have many of the hallmarks of a epidemic or even pandemic flu.

HOWEVER.

That doesn’t mean you should freak out. Many of the steps you can take are what you should be doing anyway to maintain basic public health:
Wash your hands often and thoroughly. You don’t need sanitizer, washing for 30 seconds is actually more effective than sanitizer.
Cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze. One shouldn’t need to say this, but there are plenty of people out there who lack the sense to do this.
Don’t go out if you’re sick; stay home. Don’t go to work. Don’t go to school. Don’t go out in public. When you are sick and go out in public you are passing your illness onto others-some others who may not have the immune system to defeat whatever you have.

Yes, the flu can be frightening, but it’s also fascinating.

If you’d like to read more about the flu, I highly recommend Flu : The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 & the Search for the Virus That Caused It by Gina Kolata. She discusses the history associated with the virus, as well as attempts to uncover what made the virus so deadly.

So don’t panic, but pay attention to the people around you. And listen to the news. If your area is affected, limit your time outside of your house, and most importantly wash your hands frequently.

Today is world health day.

This year’s focus is emergency preparedness for hospitals and medical facilities.

If there’s a disaster, you want your hospital to be ready.

Happy Pi day!

May as well go eat pie since you’re most of the way there.

If you’re a guy you may want to wander off at this point and look at pictures of trucks or comics or whatever manly things you do when girl cooties are involved. If you’re married, you may want to read on, because this information could be useful for your wife.

Last year when I went for my yearly exam, the doctor asked me if I wanted to also get the HPV test done.

For those of you who aren’t aware, HPV (human papillomavirus) is the cause of cervical cancer. You won’t necessarily get cervical cancer if you have HPV, but it does place you at risk.

So I told my doctor sure, I’m all about testing for cancer, and then promptly forgot about the test.

This year when I went in for my exam I was told that since the pap smear and the HPV test had come back negative, I don’t have to get another pap smear until 2011.

I still need to get my yearly gynecological checkups, but I get three whole years without, “now this is going to pinch just a little bit.” Which I think is quite nice.

The HPV Test website provides more information, if your doctor hasn’t already suggested this option.

A couple weeks ago I was talking with a friend about her daughter (16 months old) who is learning to talk.

Two things came up in the discussion that, after some thinking, fascinated me.

First, was that she is learning nouns, and doesn’t yet have any verbs. (We had a brief discussion about whether bye-bye was a verb. I concluded it’s a noun.[We’re going bye-bye.]) That’s a very interesting concept. To have words for things, but not words for doing. (IIRC, young children who are first learning verbs speak grammatically correctly [assuming their parents do that is] but once they start to learn the rules of grammar, they seem to forget what they learned intuitively and then make mistakes of tense. Assuming I am remembering correctly.)

What a strange world, to know that things have names, but not to know that actions have associated words.

It also came up that toddlers don’t really have a sense of time (which helps a bit to clarify why verbs are a problem) and for a toddler, everything is NOW. Not only is there no sense of future, there isn’t particularly a memory of the past, at least memory as we have it. You can’t tell a toddler “we’ll do that in five minutes” or “in a couple hours” because those ideas don’t make any sense to them.

I remember reading one story written from the sense of a creature that had no sense of past or future but only now. It was in the first Thieves’ World anthology series, and was written from the point of view of a dog. The idea in that story is that there is a sense of recognition or places or smells, but not of the past or future. It was a world of nouns, with only a few verbs, such as RUN and SMELL.

Is that how the world of a toddler is? Do they have a memory of senses, but not of events? What a frightening world that would be: not only would you have no control over anything in your life, you would recognize presences that are comforting (or not) and smells and sounds, but if someone goes away, you have no guarantee they will ever return.

I think it’s far more difficult than we imagine, being a child.

If you’ve been following along at home, you’ll remember that today is my Dad’s surgery.

We’re off to Wheeling, where I may or may not be without Internet access for the next several days. I’m taking my new netbook, and I have hopes for at least getting access through Michael’s phone, but at the very least I’ll have my cell phone, so I’ll be twittering (however, unless I have Internet access, I won’t be seeing what anyone else says for awhile.)

So I’ve got a bag full of magazines, a netbook, and a cell phone. So I should be plenty distracted.

I hope.

Today is penguin awareness day!

The Monday before Christmas, in a long and convoluted manner, doctors discovered a mass in my father’s abdomen. It was relatively quickly determined to be outside the alimentary canal, but behind the source of his digestive distress for the past six months. After a whole bunch of tests, they have finally scheduled his surgery.

Friday the 23rd he goes in for surgery; the difficulty of the surgery and the length of his recovery will be determined partially by the amount of scar tissue in his abdomen from his prostate surgery a decade ago, and his radiation therapy last summer.

Although I hope the surgery is fast and has a quick recovery, the procession of events leading up to this point has been chaotic to say the least, so I am expecting a difficult surgery (for the surgeon–Dad will be out through the process) and a lot of time spent in the hospital waiting for his bowels to wake up.

For my own sanity, I’ll be twittering from the hospital, so you can check my twitter feed to see when he comes out of surgery, but I won’t actually get twitter updates on my phone, so if you’ll want to reach me you’ll have to do it the old fashioned way and either txt or e-mail. :)

So if I’m not around much, check my twitter feed (conveniently located in my sidebar) if you’re curious what’s going on.

Meanwhile, I’ve still got a week’s worth of posts to come up with. :)

I hate my body.

No really.

I didn’t exercise once for the entirely of my vacation. In fact, I spent much of vacation on the sofa.

On top of that, I ate cookies and pie and bread dressing.

So why, WHY! did I lose four pounds since the last time I went to the gym? (And my pants feel a tad bit larger as well.)

I don’t think I’ve ever seriously made a single New Years Resolution. Yeah I made up some when pressed by my friends, but it was just something off the top of my head, not anything I meant.

I’ve never quite gotten the point of New Years Resolutions.

If something is important, why not just do it once you have decided it is important?

Mind you, this doesn’t always work either–I think I threw dozens of cigarette packs out the car window in the years I was trying to quit. But when I finally quit it was in July (1997, so it’s been 11 1/2 years), far from the time of Resolutions. (For those who are interested, going back on anti-depressants was the little extra push I needed to quit, to tone down my anxiety.)

I started regularly going to the gym during autumn (seven years ago I think).

Over the past several years I have slowly added more organic, healthy, and whole grain foods into my diet.

None of these things were resolutions. All that happened was that I realized I needed to make a change in my life and did it. Doesn’t mean it was easy, it doesn’t mean that tricks don’t hurt (an exercise partner is first and foremost a most useful trick).

Saying you’re doing something and telling others also helps–the knowledge that someone might ask you how things are going is a good impetus for keeping things going.

Yes, things don’t always work. I’ve been trying for years to get a regular writing schedule, but other than writing here (on my weblog), I’ve never been able to keep a regular writing schedule for more than a month and a half. But I think overall I have a pretty good success rate–at least for the important stuff.

So consider resolving not to make any resolutions this year. If nothing else, you’ll be able to enjoy January without any extra guilt.

Happy Winter Solstice!

You’ll probably be unsurprised to learn that I was a klutz as a kid.

What brings this up is that for some unknown reason I remembered “black drawing salve” this evening.

I got a lot of splinters (worst was when I filled both hands with splinters from playing with an old broom handle.) Occasionally when they couldn’t get the splinters out, my parents would put black drawing salve on the area, and then would remove the splinter later.

What I remember most is that it stank like you wouldn’t believe, and I never really felt that it did any good.

Surprisingly, when I googled drawing salve, I got about 45k results, with the top ones saying how it’s still around because it really works.

So I’m now curious as to whether my memory is incorrect. It’s possible that 1) all the episodes with splinters ran together so it just felt like it didn’t work because I was always getting splinters dug out of my hands or 2) my parents didn’t leave it on long enough for it to work. (I must have been four of five during my most vivid memories. Can’t imagine how difficult it must have been to keep something like that on my hands.)

That’s right folks, happiness is contagious.

Just remember, I’m here for your health.