The Best Interesting Random Facts
Yes, this is an irrational thought, but there are things you can do to challenge it. First, look at this fear from a rational perspective: How many people do you know who have contracted hepatitis? Second, how many people have contracted any disease from a garbage can? Third, how many people have contracted hepatitis from […]
The Internet can be a significant source of misinformation about vaccines. There are numerous sites that gather scare stories about vaccination based on little more than anecdotal reports from parents, and many chat rooms discussing vaccination in hysterical voices and without benefit of scientific information. This doesn’t mean that vaccines are without dangers, there are […]
Bacillus cereus is a rod-shaped aerobic organism that comes in two different forms, neither one of which is fun to have. The one that causes diarrhea doesn’t cause vomiting, but the one that causes vomiting also causes diarrhea. The only good news is that either way, you get sick and get well fast: symptoms can […]
Dirty laundry, as you might have guessed, certainly contains plenty of germs, including many that are pathogenic. Any cloth that touches your body is likely to become contaminated with whatever organisms are on your skin, and we know what can happen in the special case of underwear. But the Centers for Disease Control agrees with […]
Here’s a word we hope you’ve never heard before: myiasis. Myiasis refers to diseases caused by the deposition of insects or insect larvae in living tissue. And this happens in real life, in both animals and man, and not just in horror movies. One Indian boy, it was reported in 2001, actually had a wound […]
We all know it’s healthy to go to the gym regularly, but did you ever wonder what’s in the sweat of the guy who used the exercise machine just before you? Sure, he wipes off the machine with that towel, but that’s not exactly sterilizing, is it? Are you supposed to touch that stuff, and […]
Children in day care probably get more antibiotics prescribed for them than children who stay at home. A May 2001 Danish study followed children from birth in 1997 to the age of two years and found that enrollment in a day care center doubled a child’s likelihood of being prescribed an antibiotic. Whether this is […]
Everyone’s afraid of rabies, but almost no one in the United States ever gets it. Even a hundred years ago, it was very rare, about 100 people a year got it in the early twentieth century, and today, thanks to widespread vaccination of domestic animals, the average yearly number of human cases is 2 or […]
You go to a hospital to get well, but you have to remember that a hospital is one public place that’s bound to be filled with germs, after all, it’s people with germs who wind up there, all kept close together with a staff of caretakers who are almost inevitably going to transmit germs from […]
The company that makes Lysol announced in a television commercial that they are now selling a kind of paper towel soaked in liquid disinfectant, “kills 99.9 percent of germs”, the same percentage that Tide with Bleach claims to wipe out. There are all sorts of products, hundreds of them, that are advertised as antibacterial, including […]
Every medication is unique in terms of how long it stays in the body. The term “half-life” is used describe the length of time it takes the body to clear/eliminate/metabolize 50 percent of a dose. This concept leads to the goal of a “steady state,” which is where the daily dose equals what the body […]
Chlamydia is probably the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States, even more common than herpes-2. There were more than 640,000 new cases of chlamydia reported in 2000 and more than 290,000 through the first six months of 2001. Since all diseases are underreported, and since most people with chlamydia are not even […]
A lot of people worry about “picking up something” while they’re using public transportation. In New York City, the most feared location for mysophobes is undoubtedly the subway. Everyone squashed together, sneezing, coughing, wiping their noses, and then grabbing those poles to keep from falling over every time the train stops, starts, or lurches. The […]
Shigellosis is another disease kids risk contracting in day care centers and passing on to their families. In 1991 there was an outbreak of Shigella sonnei infection in Lexington-Fayette County, Kentucky, that involved 14 licensed day care centers, making a lot of people sick but, every cloud has a silver lining, giving researchers a chance […]
Yes, it is possible to be hospitalized for OCD. This can occur for several reasons. First, it may be a way to help stabilize someone whose rituals have become so problematic that all he or she does all day long is perform rituals. Often in these cases family members will bring someone in to a […]
Pyromania is, according to the DSM-IV-TR (2000), “deliberate and purposeful fire setting on more than one occasion.” Prior to the act of fire setting, there is an increase in tension, and there is a long-held fascination with fire. Once the fire is set, there is a sense of relief or joy. Fires set by people […]
Rabies is a virus, and the usual route of transmission to humans is by the bite of an infected animal. Rabid dogs are the main transmitter of the illness in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In the United States, where vaccination of pets has controlled the disease, the infection is uncommon, and when it does […]
John Lynn, of Austin, Texas, thinks people don’t wash their hands often enough, and he thinks it’s about time someone did something about it. According to Patent Number 6,147,607, Mr. Lynn has designed a way of preventing people from slipping away from the bathroom without washing. He proposes a mechanism attached to a toilet handle […]
Rubbing on insect repellent and slapping at mosquitoes is a summertime tradition. Just the smell of a spritz of Off! gives some people Proustian recollections of fun-filled days at summer camp. But until the 1920s, mosquitoes were a cause of deadly epidemics in the United States, and everyone now knows that they’re back again carrying […]
You may think that sexually transmitted infections are someone else’s problem, but in fact 55 million Americans have at least one sexually transmitted disease (STD). More than 45 million Americans have HSV-2, the sexually transmitted form of the herpes simplex virus, and a million more get it every year. There’s no cure for it. Two […]
Well, okay, so I can get plenty of diseases from those pets, but at least I can’t catch anything from my tropical fish, right? Not so fast. It would be absurd to tell you that keeping pet fish is a big risk for human illness, it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean they can’t make you […]
Many people with OCD fear bodily fluids, it is a very prevalent obsession in OCD, and it can have a major effect on them and on their personal relationships. This fear can affect people with OCD in several ways. First, they may fear saliva because it can carry germs from the mouth, or they may […]
A new infectious agent, a protozoan parasite called Cyclospora cayetanensis, was first identified and named in 1979. It was previously thought to be a kind of cyanobacterium. By 1993, it had been found in the United States. The first U.S. report of a diarrheal outbreak caused by the organism didn’t appear until 1995. Then in […]
Swenson’s Wild Midwest Exotic Petting Zoo is apparently a popular attraction in Clermont, Iowa, and in August 1999 they featured a bear cub. It was really cute, and it let people touch it and wrestle with it. Occasionally it would nip at people, but it never really hurt anyone. The cub was also brought to […]
The Italians call it the French disease; the French call it the English disease. Russians blamed the Poles, the Poles blamed the Germans. At least since the sixteenth century, Europeans have been blaming each other, if it isn’t English, French, Polish, Russian, or German, then it’s Venetian or Neapolitan. Some believe Columbus brought it back […]
This is actually a more common OCD experience than people would think: You saw a story on the news about a hit-and-run accident in the town next to yours. You called the police to tell them you might have done it, and they came to your house and questioned you. When you told them you […]
Malaria is not the only insect-borne disease now afflicting Americans. Lyme disease, named after the city in Connecticut where it was first identified, comes from the bite of a tick infected with a spirochetal bacterium. Two species of tick, Ixodes scapularis and I. pacificus, are the primary villains. I. scapularis lives in the East and […]
Several vaccines were developed in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Waldemar Haffkine, a Russian microbiologist who spent much of his time in India, developed a vaccine for cholera in 1892 and a vaccine for bubonic plague in 1897. Given the millions of people who have died over the centuries from these diseases, these two […]
Here are some facts you might want to consider before proceeding with piercing your belly button. There is always risk when you have any part of your body pierced. It is minor surgery and should be treated as such. With navel piercings, you are at a higher than average risk for infection for two reasons. […]
You’ll find that the rice flours are as common to gluten-free baking as wheat flour is to traditional baking. There are subtle differences between these three flours, primarily with respect to baking performance. From a dietary fiber and protein perspective they are similar to each other, except that brown rice flour has approximately forty fewer […]
OCD is not a new disorder. In fact, OCD has been written about for centuries, as far back as the sixth century. According to Ian Osborn in his book Tormenting Thoughts and Secret Rituals (1999), there are numerous references to what we now call OCD in early religious and Greek writings. Many of the early […]
Syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, papillomavirus, chlamydia, you’d think that would be enough bacteria and viruses to worry about, especially at a moment when you’re preoccupied with something more pressing. But there’s more. The cause of trichomoniasis is neither a bacterium nor a virus. It’s the cause of a microscopic parasite, a protozoan called Trichomonis vaginalis that […]
We often speak of the possibility and desirability of eradicating diseases, and it does seem that it should be possible to eradicate at least those whose causes we know and for which we have good and effective treatments. This would seem to apply to most of the sexually transmitted diseases. But in all of history, […]
While resistant strains of the potentially deadly S. aureus bacterium have been known for some years to occur in hospitals, it is only recently that these strains have made their way into the community at large. In 1997, a seven-year-old girl from an urban area of Minnesota was admitted to a hospital with a temperature […]
There are dozens of different species of cockroach, and the one probably most familiar in restaurants is the German cockroach. Many people believe that cockroach infestation is one of the burdens of living in a crowded city, but in fact the insects can and do live in the wide open spaces of rural areas just […]
In 1918, the flu season came on a bit early, in April, but a few weeks before that 84,000 additional American troops had set out for Europe to fight the Germans, so there were more important things to worry about than the “grippe.” That some people died during the spring was unremarkable, before there were […]
