August, 2023. 

I’ve spent a couple of hours on the phone today, yesterday, as well as other days, sorting out health insurance.  

My family has genes for something that is fairly common in Northern Europeans.  It’s a mis-spelling at a particular point in our DNA that can make a body hold on to excessive amounts of iron.  

Iron overload can cause a lot of damage to a human body.  In males, the symptoms begin to show up in their later 20s to early forties.  In women, it takes 10 or so years after menopause.  Heart disease, diabetes, liver damage, joint damage, and dementia are common. 

People need iron to do important jobs at a cellular level. Too little is called anemia, and leaves people tired, weak, and pale.  

When a body has too much iron, and cannot get rid of it, a complex set of symptoms begin to show up.  Excess iron gets deposited in joints and soft tissues.  Knee joints and hip joints begin to degrade = rust. - from the iron.  Liver, pancreas, and heart suffer damage as iron builds up in those organs.  My uncle experienced a sudden deafness in one ear from a tiny bleed in his brain.  The iron from the blood took a long time to work its way out, with a gradual improvement in his hearing. 

There’s a really interesting factor that started to make some sense, with active, slender people with moderate diets developing diabetes with no clear reason.  In some of those folks, a surgery that by-passes part of the stomach and the first section of the small intestine caused immediate reversal of their diabetes.  Various methods of bypass include putting in a sleeve to block the stomach contents from touching the intestinal wall in that short section, with the same result.   Humans absorb iron in the first few inches of the small intestine.  Most people who have stomach by-pass typically need an infusion of iron into their blood every few months.  

When one of my siblings turned up with this condition, he was tested and found to have 2 genes for it.  The other siblings went out to get tested right away.  So far, only one of us has 2 genes for it.  3 have one gene, I have zero.  The way genetics for conditions like this typically work is pretty straight forward.  Humans pass along one set of genes from each parent.  Because our genetics are recorded in a double-strand of DNA, one strand is in the egg, the other in the sperm.  Put together, this makes a recipe for a new person.  If, in the case of my family, each parent has one gene for the condition, then it’s a little like rolling 2 dice with  equal numbers of  YES or NO sides.  Each child has four things that could come up. 

Yes, Yes      Yes, No     No, Yes     No, No 

Each of us had 1/4 chance at 2 Yeses, 1/4 chance of 2 Nos, and 2/4 chances at 1 Yes and 1 No.  

My brother got 2 Yeses,  I got 2  Nos.  Three others in my family got 1 Yes/ 1 No, and one hadn’t tested but has knee problems and diabetes. 

This is a very common gene in people of Northern European, Irish, and Scottish ethnicities.  I have 99.7% of my genes from Europeans, and 29% from Ireland and Britain.  Ireland has the highest rate of Hemochromatosis on the globe.  Second place goes to Norway    I’ve got ancestors all over the place over there.  

Moving on in History

We're just past the election, enough that the results seem clear.  I had been reading old novels from a previous century, just to settle my mind.  Now I'm reading speculative fiction about the future.  Even reading a Reader's Digest can seem overwhelming, because it is about the current times.  The future is well out of my reach, and the past can be chewed over and evaluated for hits of what our species (OK, I'm actually talking about myself) can do to take some measure of control out of the maelstrom.

Some people feel compelled to make public demonstrations in large groups.  Some people are looking into leaving the country for a few years.  Some people think they are bound to do better under a new leader, others fear the future.

Reading history is very instructive, even when it is in a novel, and one thing that surfaces with regularity is that we are not seeing anything new right now.  People are constantly thinking they are more advanced than their deceased predecessors, and thusly will not make the subtle but defining mistakes made in the past.

Wherever you go, people will find things to fight over.
People will find ways to take power from others.
People fall in and out of love.
People will claim a spiritual being (benign or evil) compelled their behavior.

Being old enough to inspire a little awe in my teen child (You lived through the cold war and Vietnam? ) as a balance for standard teen derision of all things extant does not make me wise.  It makes me cautious and willing to give humanity a fighting chance to be humane.

What I can do as an individual is make an effort to be kind, spend what money I have where it supports the society in which I want to keep living, and find spots of joy every day to share.

It is not much, but in this current environment, now that I can get my head out of a novel, it is what I can handle.

What can you do?

Walk Like an Italian 1

passeggiata

ˌpasəˈjädə/

Walk Like an Italian

Our friends tell us they walk after dinner, and dinner ends with chocolate.  They walk slowly, strolling, and talking, sometimes not even talking.  Their kids are either in bed or reading quietly, and the walk takes them just around their block.  

It is part of a way of living which includes some changes in food and exercise, but isn't a "diet" or "exercise" program.  

Beguiled by the image of my two driven friends holding themselves back to a pedestrian pace, my husband and I have taken a few after-dinner strolls through the neighborhood, frequently reminding one another to stroll, not stride.  At a stroll, the scenery seems sharper, the flowers more full, and the opportunity to greet neighbors is more than a nod one gives to a jogger sporting earbuds.

 We noticed a pair of ducks dabbling on Sunday, slipping in and out of the roots on the creek banks, nosing upstream for dinner.  A drake seem to stay behind the duck, keeping her in his watchful gaze.  Just past the ducks, the neighbor who hosts my chorus rehearsals greets us with his new puppy, and we chat about the concert coming up and how the soloists sounded.  He's just retired, and is as happy as a person might wish to be.  The puppy leans agains my ankle and keeps guard on the action across the creek.  His fur is as soft as baby's hair, and I can't help but adore his childish joy.    

We stop at the middle of the bridge over the creek to watch for fish and for swallows which swoop in arcs under the bridge as they hunt for insects.  How the world must look to their eyes!  They move so fast it is hard to track their actions, and I've never seen one crash.  The water shifts the long green strands that anchor in the creek bed, but the surface is smooth.  I know the lake that empties into this stream, and have seen its waters roaring at the underside of the bridge, and seen stranded fish dead in muddy holes in the dry years.  Sometimes the nearby houses are sandbagged to keep the flood at bay, and sometimes we can walk across the parched sands.  Every year is different, and every walk shows something new. 

The stroll takes us by several Free Little Libraries, a bit of joy in the city.  These little boxes share books all around the neighborhoods, and we stop at each one, sometimes just looking, sometimes leaving a book we're ready to send along, and sometimes taking one home.  The rules are simple:  Be kind, share. Take a book you like, leave one if you wish.  There is a story somewhere about the originator of the idea, but the boxes are legion now, and well past the first wave of the initiator's plan.  

We get home, and sip a bit of wine, our choice in place of chocolate.  A smile, a squeeze of our hands, and we're ready to close the day.  It is good. 

Ciao

  

Autumn: River of Birds

To do the tidy thing for the winter town yard, I must trim back the tops of all my plants, pull out the annuals and leave the garden beds naked in their dirt-skins.  The grass is expected to lie naked of leaves.  For this we will not remove them as much as chop finely with our lawn mower.  

The leaves are not raked.  The gardens stand waiting for a healthy cleansing of this past summer's growth.  The hard freeze came.  There is no more hope for keeping on the few hardy marigolds and mums.  Petunias of unusual vigor held out in defiant blooms against the frosty background of fallen leaves.  The leaves I have not raked.  How can I rake away the leaves which kept the last few flowers bright for my pleasure? 

I'm pleased, perhaps somewhat perversely, by how well our gardens grew with very little effort.  The neighbor with the "perfect," lawn works like a fiend; mowing and watering daily, fertilizing, spraying chemicals, pulling weeds, planting annuals, trimming back tops. He is never smiling or satisfied at his work.  For me it is an effort of joy, the blossoms sharing their secret smiles with me as we look into the sun.

Now it is cold, and the sun warms my face and the earth a little, enough only to melt the water in the bird's bath.  Under those leaves in the garden lies the sleeping joy of next spring's bright green and rainbow of flowers.  The chill wind pushes at me as I think, bear-like, of a warm den and a long nap.  Clouds scuttle overhead, blocking my sun, and out of the north comes a river of black birds, screaming their irritation as they pass southward.  I feel a wild flush, and wish to join them, running as they fly, over land, across water, on and on until we come to summer again.  The wind pushes them on, and me back, as the den and the nap remind me that I cannot fly, nor run over rivers and across cities and mountains and plains.  A ragged gasp of disappointment shudders my frame as the river of birds stretches from horizon to horizon.  Cannot an adult spin and laugh out loud for amazement and joy at the wonders?  The solemn square houses and church face me in stern reproach,  as I run my small yard's length, then sit in the leaves and laugh at the river in the sky, and the bear in me.  

Your Head on Lead

Why Gas changed the world, and how we can take it back.


http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria

Miracle Drugs

When my son was 2 years old, my wife caught a cold which took a turn for the worse.  Eventually, she was coughing every minute and was unable to sleep at all.  After a couple of trips to the doctor, it was determined she had pneumonia, and was given a powerful antibiotic.  After just a few days on the antibiotic, she was much improved, and able to sleep and recuperate.  In the days before antibiotics, I may have become a widower.  They truly are miracle drugs.

Unfortunately, there are bacteria which have become adapted and can survive the most powerful antibiotic drugs we have.  These are the so-called superbugs.  We have created these superbugs through overuse of antibiotics.

Infections of the ear, urinary tract, skin and lungs are increasingly taking stubborn forms requiring more antibiotics or combinations to cure.  New strains of age-old infectious bacteria are getting harder and harder to treat.

Superbugs

MRSA -- methicillin-resistant (or multi-drug-resistant) Staphylococcus aureus -- is increasingly attacking healthy people, mostly as nasty, invasive skin infections, but also as aggressive pneumonias.  Staphylococcus aureus ("staph") is a very common bacteria, and is part of the normal flora found on the skin and in nasal passages.  MRSA is sometimes known as the "flesh eating" bacteria, and has made the news frequently, such as this young women who recently survived her battle with this antibiotic-resistant bacteria after cutting her leg on a tree.

Meanwhile, certain other bacteria like Acinetobacter baumannii and Klebsiella pneumonia are becoming more lethal, attacking vulnerable hospitalized patients.  Sometimes, they are unaffected by most or all antibiotics available to physicians.  Such bacteria are still the exception, but they illustrate the importance of attempts to stem the proliferation of drug-resistant bacteria.

In 2010, just one of these superbugs, MRSA, caused serious infections in some 80,042 Americans, and killed 11,478. [1]

Antibiotic overuse and abuse

How have these superbugs come about?  We have saturated our environment with antibiotics, drugs we created to fight bacterial infections.  Some 7 million pounds of antibiotics are sold for human use each year, while 29 million pounds are sold for use in animals, mostly food animals.  This represents a gross overuse of the drugs, and makes it less likely they will work for fighting infections when we need them.

Bacteria exist in teeming numbers -- in fact, our own resident bacteria, mostly good helpful bacteria aiding our digestion, outnumber our own body's cells, although much smaller in size.  They reproduce rapidly and can pass on genetic traits including resistance to antibiotics not just to succeeding generations but also to other, different strains of bacteria.  The more often they encounter antibiotics, the more quickly they adapt to them, becoming resistant and hardier.

Respiratory infections such as coughs and colds account for 60 to 70 percent of all antibiotics prescribed in doctors' offices, but only one in five of those infections really need antiobiotics. [2]  The greatest majority of those illnesses are due to viruses, not bacteria.  Antibiotics have no effect at all on viruses.  Some patients want an antibiotic even if there's only a small chance it will help, and doctors often go along with them.  Instead, make sure your doctor knows you want an antibiotic only if it's absolutely necessary.

Some patients also fail to take the entire course of antibiotics as prescribed, or even save pills for later use or to share.  This allows germs to persist, develop resistance and may allow them to come roaring back causing an even more serious illness.  The U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that in hospitals, nearly half of all antibiotic prescriptions are inappropriate.

Don't take antibiotics without a physician's advice, and only when necessary.  Don't take antibiotics for the common cold.  Be sure to take antibiotics exactly as prescribed, completing the entire course unless otherwise advised by a doctor.

Effect on the Individual and the Community

Antibiotic use affects the individual and the community.  It changes the mix of bacteria living in the gut and on the skin, killing weak bacteria and giving drug-resistant bacteria a chance to take hold.  Research suggests taking commonly prescribed antibiotics increases one's own risk of being infected with MRSA.  Recent or current treatment with antibiotics is the single biggest risk factor for infection with Clostridium difficile ("C.diff"), a drug-resistant bacteria that can cause severe diarrhea.  Found most commonly in health care facilities, this bacteria is estimated in being linked with 14,000 American deaths per year.

Resistant bugs can also be passed to household members, like any bacteria.  One study found that family members of a person taking antibiotics for acne were more likely to have drug-resistant acne germs on their skin.

According to the CDC (April 2011), antibiotic resistance in the United States costs an estimated $20 billion a year in excess health care costs, $35 billion in other societal costs and more than 8 million additional days that people spend in the hospital.

Not Just People

Human medicine isn't the only place where antibiotics are used too frequently.  Most cattle, pigs and poultry are given antibiotics, not just to treat illnesses or to prevent the spread of disease, but also to promote faster growth.  These drugs are often the same as or very similar to drugs used to treat people.  

Eating contaminated meat transmits superbugs created in animal use of antibiotics to humans.  In 2011, 136 people in 34 states got sick and one person died after eating ground turkey carrying a strain of salmonella resistant to multiple antibiotics.  Farms also spread the bacteria.  Most of the bacteria end up outside the animal, as fecal matter.  Where does the fecal matter go?  Into the water and into the soil.  The soil dries and gets broken into dust.  Everybody is downwind or downstream from someone else.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently issued new guidelines that call for a halt to the usage of antibiotics to enhance growth in animals.  One wonders where the U.S. Department of Agriculture is on this issue.

The Future?

Antibiotic resistance is a complex, global and growing problem.  Resistance is produced by the misuse of antibiotics.  Lives are already being lost to antibiotic resistance.  We need to get antibiotics out of the environment as best we can. 

(*) The Rise of Resistance -- reference
[1] U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
[2] Ralph Gonzales, M.D.,  University of California, San Francisco

Crawling Like a Baby

My son is working through a therapy called, "Neurological Reorganization."  When I was in elementary school, the whole school did some of the same stuff, and the program had been around since the 1940s.  To get him to be more motivated, I did everything with him, including lying on my belly on the kitchen floor, and crawling.  We began the program when I'd been having a lot of low back pain, and even rolling over in bed was agony.  Getting down on my front on the kitchen floor looked like a huge sacrifice of my dignity, as well as a lot more pain.  For the first week, my knees and elbows grew bruises and (when I crawled on the carpet) blisters.  Then I got smarter, and put on knee and elbow pads.

One morning found myself without back pain - and rejoiced that I had found something I could do with my son that helped me out, as well.  We laughed at one another, listened to goofy CDs of Bill Cosby, Terry Foy, and others, and played games of hiding small cat toys around the house.  I felt my waistline beginning to come back into the shape I remembered fondly from photographs...but had not seen for four or five years.

As we crawled on the wooden floor of the kitchen, I thought about the motions my body made, and how the core muscles were being used to slide, lift and propel my body forward, but without much weight resting on my spine.  The twisting of the torso and the alternating arm/leg movements were a decent workout, and I worked up a sweat.  If nothing else, it was 40 minutes of exercise I could get at home, while doing things with my child.  The mouse-eye perspective of my cabinets and floor gave me some inspiration to collect the pet fur and drips more often.

For about a week, our schedule seemed way too hectic for me to get my crawling in before breakfast, and with my 51-year-old body, I just don't want to lie on my tummy after eating.  One weekend vigorous gardening and the next Monday morning, I woke up with a sore back again.

I'm back at crawling again, even with my nearing-teen-age child asking me to not be in the same room, or not do my work-out at the same time he does.  (Sigh.  He's getting to THAT age.)  I miss a day now and then, but getting my old bones down on the floor looks a lot better after knowing what it does for me.  This core-body work-out needs no special equipment and you don't need to leave home.   For us, NR is now a family exercise.