The Best Interesting Random Facts
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 […]
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 […]
Not widely recognized in the United States, sorghum is the world’s third largest grain crop. As a whole grain, sorghum is also known as milo or kafir and is a key ingredient in regions of India and Africa. Sorghum grains are small and bead-like with a beige color. Like millet, sorghum is bland and dry, […]
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 […]
Ever get your nails done at a nail salon? A lot of people do: nail care is a $6 billion a year industry in the United States, and there are tens of thousands of nail salons all across the country, 7,500 in California alone. One day in 2001 a dermatologist called the health department and […]
In July 1989, Minnesota held a three-week statewide wrestling camp and 175 high school wrestlers aged 14 to 18 came to participate. Everything went fine until the final week, when many of them started breaking out in rashes around their heads and necks or on their extremities. Several had eye infections. Some had swollen lymph […]
Bacteriologists are quite proud when their name becomes attached to a disease causing organism. This is not true of other people, American Legion members are not at all happy about having Legionnaire’s disease named after them, and homeowners and real estate agents in Lyme, Connecticut, could have done without having their city’s name permanently attached […]
A microorganism is a living entity that is so small it can only be seen with the aid of a microscope. A pathogen is an organism that causes disease. Examples of pathogens include bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungi. Note that a pathogen does not have to be a microorganism; some parasitic worms cause disease and […]
Since 1989, when it surpassed the number of outbreaks caused by salmonella, Campylobacter has been the most common cause of bacterial gastroenteritis in the United States. An estimated 2.4 million people get infected with it every year. It’s a gram-negative rod-shaped bacterium, and there are three species of it that cause human disease. C. coli […]
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. […]
Although the FTC doesn’t regulate the production or labeling of over the counter drugs, it does have a say in the way they are advertised. And they can be just as fussy as the FDA when it comes to making claims about antibacterial products. A complaint the FTC filed against Unilever in 1999 is illustrative. […]
If you’re worried about your own drinking water, you can have it tested. E. coli, shigella, cryptosporidium, and giardia don’t have any taste and they’re invisible, so you can’t tell if they’re in your water by looking or drinking. If your water comes from a municipal system, it is tested on a regular basis anyway, […]
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 […]
A tattoo parlor doesn’t seem like a particularly salubrious place, and having someone stick a needle through your skin seems obviously to carry some risk, but the risk of getting any blood-borne disease by getting a tattoo are extremely low, at least in the United States. Although it is of course theoretically possible to transmit […]
You may have heard that you can get something called toxoplasmosis from your cat. Toxoplasma gondii, the organism that causes the disease is a protozoan parasite that infects most species of warm blooded animals. It has a fairly complex life cycle consisting of three different stages. The first is the tachyzoite, the form that causes […]
Cultural beliefs about mental illness can significantly impact how an individual, and his family, views bipolar disorder. In some Asian cultures, the stigma of mental illness is quite severe, and having a mental illness can be viewed as shameful (loss of face). Certain religious groups will have strong beliefs against the taking of medications (Christian […]
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 […]
You may remember Chlamydia trachomatis, it’s the bacterium that causes the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States, chlamydia. A closely related species, Chlamydia psittaci, infects pet birds (and more rarely certain wild birds as well) and can be transmitted to humans, who can get flu-like symptoms from it, and sometimes more serious […]
Being bitten by infected ticks and mosquitoes, alas, is not the only germ danger you face while enjoying the great outdoors. In fact, just going for a swim can make you sick, even if you never get near an insect. Cryptosporidium, Giardia, and Shigella are out to get you, and they’re lurking where you swim, […]
On September 3, 1999, 10 children in counties near Albany, New York, were hospitalized with bloody diarrhea, and everyone wanted to know why. Health officials quickly discovered two facts: they were all infected with E. coli O157:H7, the most deadly form of the E. coli bacterium, and they had all attended the Washington County Fair, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Prozac (generic name: fluoxetine) was one of the first new antidepressants classified as an SSRI, and it is still popular. Prozac helps the body increase serotonin at low doses and norepinephrine at higher doses. Research has also demonstrated that, like most antidepressants, Prozac helps the brain produce more of the natural neurochemicals that heal brain […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Well loved for its nutrition, taste, texture, and culinary versatility, quinoa is a gem in the repertoire of gluten-free grains. A time-honored food staple of South America and an essential food of the ancient Incas, quinoa is packed with cultural significance and history. Scientifically speaking, quinoa is a seed, but it’s commonly referred to in […]
Laundry rooms and wet clothes are famous locations for molds and mildew. What are these things? They’re fungi, plants without chlorophyll, microscopic members of the same family of plants as mushrooms. And there are lots of them: they make up about a quarter of the earth’s biomass. The fungi can be roughly divided by their […]
If we want to search for something good to come out of the 1918 disaster, perhaps we can find it in the spur to research in virology that it provoked. In the 10 years after 1918, thousands of books and articles were published about the flu. One large problem posed by the flu virus is […]
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 […]
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek loved to look at stuff through his microscope. One day in 1681, he was closely examining a sample of his own feces and described a parasite that was probably the one we now know as Giardia lamblia. It got its name, however, in 1859 from a biologist named Lambl. It is the […]
Rats, mice, flies, cockroaches, these are just things you can run into at almost any restaurant at one time or another. Every time you go out, you’re exposing yourself to something. In fact, those dollar bills in your wallet, the ones you plan to spend for the taxi ride downtown before you even do anything, […]
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 […]
The Contaminant Candidate List sounds like it might be a registry of anti-environmental office seekers published by the Sierra Club. But it’s actually a list of the contaminants in public drinking water that may require regulation, and the Environmental Protection Agency is required to issue such a list every five years. The last one came […]
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 […]
Once again, a gluten-free diet has the power to bring international flavor, tradition, and culture into the North American gluten-free kitchen with ingredients that you may never have otherwise discovered. One of the lesser known gluten-free ingredients, ragi is a gluten-free cereal grass that is not regularly mentioned in the lineup of gluten-free grains that […]
