Category: Health and Medicine

We’ve had a not-too-bad time of it, so far, to be fair, physically if not so much mentally. Other than not being able to get to a beach or legitimately visit a nature reserve, and putting holiday plans on hold, and cancelling all C5 the Band gigs for the summer and not being able to rehearse with those lovely people nor the lovely people of the TyrannoChorus, and not being able to take that nature holiday nor go camping, and having to work under the stress of a full house again having been almost empty-nesters for several months, and Mrs Sciencebase not being able to do either of her part-time work activities, the dog getting old and a bit lame, and not being able to visit family and friends, and…well, woe is me…but woe is millions of others who are suffering far worse, it’s been fine really.

I still wake far too early after tormented nights of viral existential anxiety, which does seem to have displaced the more mundane “worrying about death” kind of anxiety, but the getting up early at this time of year is critical for a moth-er, anyway. So there are pros.

So, I plough on through my usual writing deadlines, all of which are still ever-present (thankfully), but in between I seem to have taken on a village role of sharing interesting and entertaining online stuff, un-Events, you might call them. I morphed my Fen Edge Events group to do that at the start of lockdown and it’s still going strong; came up with several ideas for alternatives to local events that can no longer happen in the real world.

In among that I seem to have piled in with what I think is some creative activities, although others may disagree: Saturday Night No-Fever dancing in the living room with masks and nitrile glove, PondWatch, LawnWatch, RockWatch, and LogWatch. There was the dancing cookathon of Rock-around-the-Wok with DJ Bethan Fettermean, a virtual open mic session and a VEDay75 musical montage, several spoof phone calls, messages from Trunt and de Pfecking Johnson, our so-called Leader, and a wiretap acquisition of a call between some bloke called Dom and his Mam in the North East. I’ve done a spoof radio show based on my BFF’s More Music Breakfast on ClassicFM. I’ve written and recorded several new songs and instrumentals around the viral anxiety theme, although none of them are as depressing as that sounds.

There are also the endless moth, bird, and wildlife photos too.

Feels like a creative time and I’ve certainly seen a lot of creativity out there now that some many people are in lockdown, with the exception it seems, of that gadgy called Dom. But, to be honest, other than the travel restrictions, we’re lucky, not a lot has really changed, part of the advantage of having worked for myself from home for so long, I suppose.

Anyway, to you stay well. Stay home.

Before the Covid-19 lockdown I was working with my Editor at Chemistry World on a feature article on the hazards of handling, and specifically not mixing, different cleaning agents, such as ammonia, acids, bleaches etc. The article was written and edited, then Covid-19 hit hard and other materials took priority in the final editing queue.

However, last week reports came in that showed that accidental poisonings in the USA had risen dramatically during the Covid-19 lockdown compared with the same period last year. Indeed, they are up 20 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Moreover, there were more than 45000 emergency calls related to exposure to disinfectant and cleaning agents. About two-thirds of the incidents involved bleach and the others non-alcohol disinfectants and hand sanitisers. Serious problems can arise with ingestion or inhalation of fumes from any of these chemicals, but worse are the problems if certain ones are mixed as they can produce huge volumes of toxic gases, such as chlorine, and even explosive chemicals.

I spoke once more to my expert witnesses, we did the final edit, and ran the article…

Then, Trump’s illogical thought processes exploded with that ridiculous ill-informed and fundamentally stupid remark about “cleaning” the body of the germ, the virus, it’s tiny, you can’t see it, by injecting disinfectant or radiating someone with ultraviolet light. Neither idea has any basis in medicine and both are incredibly dangerous! Of course, you can kill the virus with disinfectant or soap and water. You can kill it with ultraviolet let, even sunlight will kill it. But, you cannot treat someone infected with it by injecting such chemicals into their body or irradiating them. Sheesh, he makes “Dubya” look almost intelligent…

Anyway, the feature article on not mixing cleaning agents is now live on the Chemistry World website and is getting a lot of reads and a lot of social media shares.

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/explainer-why-is-mixing-cleaning-chemicals-such-a-bad-idea/4011257.article

There’s an interesting quote purportedly from Arundhati Roy that’s been doing the rounds on social media for a few days. She says something about pandemics making us think of the way forward anew…if only.

Did the massive flu pandemic of a century ago force us to break with the past? What about SARS, MERS, Swine Flu, Ebola, Bird Flu, bovine TB, foot and mouth. I don’t think much changed after any of them…

Sadly, it feels like we restarted after the Spanish Flu pandemic that followed on the same industrial, destructive trajectory begun by the Victorians all the way through the 20thC and into this one…giving us the climate crisis, pollution, various animal and plant extinctions, desertification, coral bleaching, deforestation, and even more frequent emergent pathogens than we had before…oh and all those wars…

Look at the people on the streets protesting lockdown while thousands die…once this is over, it won’t be business as usual for a long time, but you can bet that ultimately we’ll go back to our old ways.

Plus ca change, I’m afraid Ms Roy :-(

Great to see the police have put a form up online so that we can report on breaches of lockdown rules…but, how do you know that your neighbour, for instance, is actually breaking the rules?

Say you have a keyworker living next door to you, but you didn’t know they are a keyworker. They leave their house entirely legitimately but more than once on a given day. The first time is as part of their important public service work, the second time to take some brief exercise around the local areas avoiding the incessant stream of new joggers on the paths that seem not to care about social distancing and spatter you with sweat as they plough through. Your neighbour was hoping to have a bit of a brain reboot during their exercise allowance to help them cope with the viral situation and the pressures of their work.

You log this in your little logbook from behind you twitching net curtain.

The police receive your report and assign a constable to check it out. They discover your neighbour was well within their rights to do their job and to take their daily exercise away from their home. An hour of that copper’s time less than well spent, one might suggest.

Meanwhile, a bunch of friends has gathered together in a back garden a few doors down. There’s music, but it’s quiet, for now. They’re having a barbecue to celebrate being furloughed on full pay and clinking glasses of punch, double dipping their tortilla chips in the hummus, and generally having a pathogenic time. One of them is looking a bit sweaty though and seems to be coughing a lot…but you can’t see any of that…

Humanity has behaved like a parasite on planet Earth, sucking out all of the goodness from the forests, the oceans, the land and laying its waste at the feet of Mother Nature. It fills the rivers with poison and the seas with plastic. It has spent almost two centuries creating the kind of cloying atmosphere that leads to boundless desertification, washes islands away, and promotes the release of yet more cloying gases from the frozen extremes. Humanity is the parasite that cages and curates all the others species with which it shares the planet, draining the life from them, and reducing its diversity through anthropocenic mass extinction.

In the light of such ongoing devastation perhaps, some outside agency thought, what the planet needed was a bit of pest control…

How about a fast-spreading illness that forces the parasite to curtail the parasite’s airborne activities? One that stops it spreading its pollution along arterial conduits with its countless gas guzzlers? One that shuts down its commercial and industrial activities that the planet might begin its recovery? One that reduces the resources available to the parasite and forces it to retreat into its domestic shells? One that even stops it allowing its bird-killing secondary pests into the outside world?

It seems that already atmospheric aberrations are already declining, the rivers are clarifying, the stars are coming out in numbers not seen for decades, the birds are singing, and wildlife is gently extending its range into the parasite’s silent cities.

Is the world healing?

Might the parasite evolve to adapt to its ecosystem in the wake of this anti-pestilence? To live in greater harmony with the rich diversity of all life on Earth? Might it settle into a more subtle existence, one that does not wreak havoc and devastation but one that speaks harmony and remediation?

Even when the only “online” we had was old-fashioned landline phones, long before, Skype and Facetime, Whatsapp and Zoom, HouseParty, and th rest, people often ended a call with a “let’s meet up soon”. We need that face-to-face, the handshakes, the hugs, the pat on the back, the ruffling of hair, the you (literally) scratch my back…

While we’re all social distancing in our splendid isolation, staying home to stay well, those online chat apps and what have you have come to the fore. Most of us have now partaken of at least one such “event”, a virtual pub crawl, a band rehearsal, a charity quiz…we can see each other’s faces, we can chat, we can message, we can share digital commodities. And, seriously, for now, while the waves of pandemic and panic endure, it really is all we have, thank goodness for the advent of what we used to called Web 2.0 when most people had only just go on to Web 1…

There’s something missing though…it’s that face-to-face, it’s the body language, the subtle look, the full-on laughter, the chance to connect in real-time in real-space without buffering, without dropouts and glitches, without sound delays and the out-of-sync video. But, there’s no way around it until the tech people come up with zero-latency electronics and even then you still have the problem of not sharing the same physical space.

So…is there something that can make it more real, something that triggers the dopamine receptors and boosts oxytocin, something to chemically or electronically substitute for the feelz? If there is, the government needs to roll out that app or send us a prescription fast…