The Black Plague and COVID

What the Plague Foretold about COVID

Photo by Peter Kvetny on Unsplash

 

Published September 2021 on Maeflowers on Medium - free link to source below

I picked a book out of a random bookcase in my house the other day, wanting to just get out of my head and read a bit. Ended up being an interesting read with more than a few parallels to recent events.

So much for trying to get away from current events

In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death & the World it Made by Norman F. Cantor, the late professor emeritus of history, sociology, and comparative literature at NYU and celebrated medievalist, was published in 2001 — well before any of the recent nonsense. His questionable plague origin commentary aside, I found parts of the book to eerily echo the last nearly 2 years of the modern age.

As Cantor noted, historians of disease find commonality in pandemics — people tend to flee to supposedly safe areas and conspiracy theories blame the disease on “strangers and unpopular minorities.” We have yet to break the cycle.

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Why is it the "Common" Cold?

 

Photo by Brittany Colette on Unsplash

We’ve all wondered it while trying so very hard to breathe through our mouths and not cough until we’re light-headed as we suffer through the annual scourge — why are colds so common? And why do we get them every winter? 

First, I have to address the misconception — colds don’t happen only in the winter. You can catch a cold-causing virus any time of the year. It’s just that winter is when everyone is stuck indoors with each other. Because the viruses that cause the common cold are spread by human-to-human contact and highly contagious, winter provides ample opportunity for transmission. There has also been some research to indicate that certain respiratory viruses are more infectious in drier air. So running the humidifier does more than moisten your sinuses — it may also help stop the spread to family members. 

Now, onto the culprits...

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Common pathogenic bacteria that live on humans

This was originally published in Maeflowers on Medium Oct. 14, 2024 as "Common Pathogenic Bacteria That Are Probably Living on You Right Now"

Photo of E. coli by CDC on Unsplash

The Vulgar Tongue

 I started a new series 2 months ago at Gross Human Body - The Vulgar Tongue.

Each Saturday, I post about a different slang term for anatomy.

This week's was launch, which surprisingly has to do with babies!

I've also written about burker, corporation, occiput, bingy, hammy, cuff, ape leader, trotters, and aris.

If you can't guess what those mean, head over to Gross Human Body and find out!

Sex, Gender, and Sports

 

Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash

The current English vocabulary fails to capture the actual inherent differences in sex and gender in the human population. For too long, society has used a binary to describe a spectrum, and it's causing problems.

In Science, we’re still trying to untangle the traditional conflation of sex and gender. This is in addition to recognizing the hormone-related differences in disease, as well as the injustices of not recognizing the full scope of intersex manifestation.

Read more about Gender vs. Sex in Biology and how genitals aren't used to play sports.

The latest culprits in unregulated supplements

Image by Jan Marczuk from Pixabay

 As of July 15, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has reported 69 illnesses in 28 U.S. states among consumers of a specific brand of recreational candies — Diamond Shroomz. The company claims that there are no illegal substances in their products, but the University of Virginia Health Toxicology Laboratory found psilocin, an hallucinogenic found in “magic mushrooms”, as a contaminant in their gummies. The company has issued a recall, but not all retailers have pulled the products.

How did this happen? And why does it matter?

Read more at Psilocin in Microdosing Gummies Is Making People Sick

Mosquito bites and illness

Mosquitoes are probably best known as annoying buzzing insects that interrupt summer outings or quiet evenings by the fire pit. But some members of this family of Diptera kill millions of people a year. The most well known mosquito-borne disease is probably malaria, but there are dozens more, from parasites that infect pets with heartworm to viruses that cause encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) in humans. 

Read about why mosquitoes bite, how they spread disease, and the diseases they cause at Sick from Mosquito Bites in Maeflowers on Medium.

Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash