The Best Interesting Random Facts
Warts, the kind that appear on the skin, often of older children, are common and benign. There are various treatments that can get rid of them, but most of them go away by themselves after a year or two. Yet there are many viruses, probably 60 or more, that cause warts, and the warts these […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In 1998, 355,642 cases of gonorrhea were reported to the CDC. This was an 8.9 percent increase from the 1997 rate and the first increase since 1985. In 1999, the latest year for which complete figures are available, 360,076 cases of gonorrhea were reported, a 9.2 percent increase over the 1997 rate and a 1.2 […]
The recovery model, or philosophy, has much in common with the harm reduction approach. Fueled by dissatisfaction with the status quo and the paternalistic “trust me, I’m a doctor” medical model, the recovery model is about giving control back to the person with the psychiatric disability and/or coexisting substance disorder. In the recovery model, the […]
Never eat oysters in a month that does not contain the letter R. Or so they say, and they may be right, at least partly. In the summer of 1997, a lot of people ignored this advice, and a lot of people got sick. It began in July in British Columbia, where the British Columbia […]
A chemist at the University of California, Davis named Gang Sun apparently felt that the smelly sock was a neglected area of research, so he set about finding a solution to this problem. According to a press release dated October 3, 2000, textiles are a great place for bacteria to grow, and bacteria and yeasts […]
If the bottle label reads “well water,” “artesian well water,” “spring water,” or “mineral water,” that certainly sounds healthful, and may even be healthful, but such sources can be polluted with cryptosporidium, too. There is a large variety of water brands, and an almost equally large variety of sources from which the water comes. A […]
The answer to this question seems obvious: homework helps children learn. However, this simple answer is incomplete and not exactly accurate. Homework should serve different purposes, depending on your child’s grade level and individual abilities. For primary grades, homework is largely used to improve reading and to review skills taught in class. Intermediate grade students […]
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 […]
In 1999, the CDC tracked nine different food-borne illnesses caused by bacteria, and confirmed by laboratory analysis 10,697 cases. Salmonella infection accounted for 4,533 of these, a little more than 42 percent. Salmonellosis is actually caused by a group of bacteria. The most common serotypes in the United States are called Salmonella enteriditis and Salmonella […]
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 […]
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 […]
Viruses are parasitic. They can only live and reproduce inside the cells of other animals or plants, in scientific terms, they are called obligate survive in one environment (if a germ can survive in more than one environment, it is called facultative); they are intracellular because they must live inside cells; they are molecular parasites […]
Giardia lamblia is the other common protozoan parasite that infests drinking water. During the 1990s, reports of giardiasis increased all over the country. In 1997–1998, the latest years for which the CDC has published statistics, New York State, including New York City, had the largest number of cases, 3,673. But before you conclude from this […]
Since we know how you get colds, we also know how you can prevent them, or at least minimize their number. Stay away from people with colds; wash your hands after touching someone who has a cold or something they’ve touched; keep your hands away from your face. If you have a cold, cover your […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
An antibacterial impregnated in a toy or in some other consumer product must be registered with the Environmental Protection Agency. Companies that manufacture such things have correctly perceived that germs on cutting boards and in children’s toys are among those people worry most about, and they’ve come to the rescue with antibacterial products they claim […]
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 […]
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 […]
Some people never learn. In October 1996, a three-week-old boy was brought into a hospital emergency room in Arizona suffering from a fever of 103.6, plus vomiting and bloody diarrhea that had been going on for more than two weeks. Why it took two weeks for the parents to bring him in is almost certainly […]
In late August 1999, the New York City Department of Health discovered an unusual outbreak of encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) concentrated among a group of elderly people living not far from La Guardia Airport in the northern part of Queens, one of New York City’s five boroughs. The Department of Health, in cooperation with […]
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, […]
The CDC couldn’t figure out why, but in June and July 1982, almost 900 people in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas came down with diarrhea, abdominal pain, and in most cases fever from an infection of Yersinia enterocolitica. The best guess was that it came from a single milk plant in Memphis that distributed a large […]
Gluten is a funny-sounding word, but it will become one of the most important words in your vocabulary. It sounds like glue, and it acts like glue. Most people, unless they are a chef or baker, don’t know what gluten is. So, if you have never heard of gluten before, you’re not alone. But this […]
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 […]
Parents of a preschooler know that games are not always fun. A young child often insists on playing by her own rules and gets upset if she loses. This typical preschool behavior can make it difficult for you and your child to genuinely enjoy playing games. It takes time, often not until the kindergarten years, […]
