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GamesPosts Tagged: ‘swine flu’
I remember on a podcast published years back I mentioned that I hit a wall just about every afternoon, growing almost irresistibly tired by around 3:00 p.m. I posited that it was a crash after the effects of caffeine I’d drank in coffee all day wore off. But I remember a SYSK listener sent an email suggesting that it wasn’t a caffeine crash but was the result of a lack of oxygen or an overabundance of carbon dioxide around the office. I never looked into the suggestion, but I was reminded of it when I came across an article on The Local — “Sweden’s News in English” — that a rise in narcolepsy cases is being linked to the swine flu vaccine.
I still haven’t gotten my hands on an H1N1 vaccine yet. And it looks a bunch of jolly men in red suits just stepped in line before me, too. According to Santa-America, a U.S. nonprofit organization that sends Santa across the United States to visit families dealing with various physical and emotional issues, the bearded giver of gifts wants protection from swine flu. I can’t blame him.
I had great plans for covering Dragon*Con this past weekend. Fan profiles! Image galleries! Write-ups of every panel I attended! Sadly, equipment failure and the lack of cheap-but-reliable WiFi sent my plans out the window. Dragon*Con is also a lot more crowded than it was when I covered it four years ago — and I just can’t be That Guy (or That Girl) who ties up traffic taking pictures and conducting interviews.
On top of that, my plans to do some write-ups yesterday were foiled by con crud, which I bring home with me every year in spite of fastidious preventive measures.
It could have been worse, though — I’m on the mend today. PAX, Penny Arcade’s annual game expo, also took place over Labor Day weekend. Yesterday, the official PAX Twitter account reported that tests had confirmed a case of H1N1 (swine) flu in an attendee.
As an Emory University alum, I have to giggle just a tiny bit at this recent New York Times article about how the school is dealing with cases of swine flu. I’m not laughing at the infected students themselves; it stinks to get so sick in the first few days of school. But I do find it amusing that the sick students are quarantined in Turman South dormitory, a residence hall that often bore the brunt of campus housing jokes. Students in the article call it the “Leper Colony,” and students who lived there back in my day might have called it the same thing, swine flu or no. It’s really far from the center of campus.
But you didn’t come here to read my college reminiscing and lame inside jokes. The point of the article is that it’s back-to-school time, which means everyone from kindergarteners to graduate students are now crammed into tiny classrooms, huffing and puffing germs all over each other.
I bet I know what you’re thinking: a blog on hand washing sounds like the most boring thing in the world. Didn’t everyone learn how to wash their hands in kindergarten? Well, maybe they did, but most likely, they don’t still give hand washing the full attention it deserves. To prove this point, I hung out in the HowStuffWorks bathroom this morning, hoping to catch my fellow staff members making egregious hand washing mistakes, such as not applying soap or not washing for long enough or worst of all, skipping the task altogether.
Here’s what I learned: You look creepy when you hang out in the bathroom with a notepad. I also learned that very few people go to the restroom at around 9:45. Perhaps that first cup of coffee hasn’t kicked in yet. But don’t take my word on hand washing slacker. Feast your eyes on this article from the Chicago Tribune, which reports that 54 percent of people haven’t changed their hand washing habits since hearing about H1N1/2009, commonly known as swine flu.
Study: Average gamer is 35, fat and bummed – “A new study says the average age of video-game players in the United States is 35, and oh, by the way: They’re overweight and tend to be depressed…” iTunes reps 1 in every 4 songs sold in U.S. – “iTunes-purchased songs now account for 25 percent [...]
You thought you were done with swine flu, but no. A new study conducted by the Dartmouth Medical School and the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole reports that the water you’re chugging may affect how well your immune system can fight off the influenza A (H1N1) virus. Healthy people (and mice) often can muster a counterattack in a snap or with a little help from some antibiotics.
But the researchers found that mice who had been drinking arsenic-laced water (100 parts per billion) for five weeks were delayed in fighting the H1N1 infection. When their immune systems finally took charge, they went overboard, which led to bleeding and damage in the lungs, according to the related EurekaAlert press release. (You can read the full article for free in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.)
I’d assume most people aren’t intentionally flavoring water with a little arsenic, unless you’re looking to enact a little revenge medieval style.
Until I’m writing about where the distress signals broadcast on nearly-dead radio stations after the human population on Earth suddenly drops to 32,845 are coming from, I won’t mention swine flu again, alright?
For whatever reason — out of concern, curiosity or just a desire to stay up to date with current events — people are going out of their way to track the H1N1 influenza virus (that’s the swine flu) in real time over the Internet.
There’s an Internet Explorer plug-in, for example.
The word is officially out on the swine flu and the danger it could potentially cause the human race. Our science bloggers Robert and Allison have done a nice job covering the issue so far here and here so I won’t cover those details here.
However, I came across this article on Marketwatch today that was kind of interesting. Seems that the swine flu scare has caused oil prices to drop some and has actually boosted the American dollar a bit. The price of oil fell about five percent this morning, settling in at $48.77 per barrell. As concerns of a pandemic spread, risky assets like stocks tend to go down. It turns out that oil traders take the stock market performance as a cue for overall economy, which is why oil prices tend to rise and fall with what’s happening on Wall St.
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