A Pox on You

Short Version:
Nothing to do with us. A big book, a dinosaur, droppings, pox, a taxi, drag-racing

Long Version:
Vancouver has been a hotbed of interestingness for almost a week now, and a lot of what's been capturing my attention has revolved around monkeys and health, and sometimes both at once. Not all of it, though: A giant book at the Frankfurt Book Fair; A new dinosaur named Sarahsaurus; the tale of how my father dropped my sister on her head when she was a baby while scrambling to not drop a package of muffins. Great stuff.

Not as great as monkeypox, though, or Anti-Monkey Butt. The latter is a powder - now available in Original, Lady and Baby versions - designed to reduce or eliminate frictional skin discomfort. The former is essentially the monkey equivalent of smallpox, although it is believed to be more naturally occurring and probably originally confined to rodents, particularly squirrels. Like smallpox and cowpox, but unlike chickenpox, monkeypox is an orthopoxvirus, which is a pretty cool word. The current concern - or, more likely, the current scaremongering newspaper sales boost attempt - is that it appears to have begun to cross the species divide, infecting humans not only as a result of human-monkey or human-rodent contact, which has always been viable, but now also from human-human contact. This, we're told, has epidemiologists somewhat concerned, as apparently the eradication of smallpox outside laboratories and subsequent halt of vaccine production has left humanity vunerable to other poxviruses which successfully adapt to human-human transfer. Human monkeypox is believed to have a 1-10% fatality rate, although this is based on statistics from central and west Africa, so it's likely that this could be greatly reduced should it begin to affect people who have money (ie Amerikans) - indeed, in 2003 several Amerikans reportedly contracted monkeypox after a shipment of Gambian animals to Amerika, including a bunch of rodents (rope squirrels, tree squirrels, Gambian giant rats, brush-tailed porcupines, dormice, and striped mice to be exact) were imperfectly quarantined and then housed in proximity to other household pet critters. Leaving aside for the moment the question of who on earth would want a Gambian giant rat as a pet, it is believed that one of these horrid-sounding beasts, along with some dormice and a rope squirrel or two, were harboring monkeypox, which they duly passed on to other rodents in their vicinity, which in turn managed to pass the disease to their new humans. None of the humans died.

Also on the health front, but with less monkeys, new research claims a correlation between air pollution and breast cancer, which kind of sucks for all women (and morbidly obese men, I guess) who live in cities. Also in health news: prolonged exposeure to loud noise increases the risk of heart disease. So, it's a big commiserations to all lathe operators, construction workers, people who have lawns, rock musicians, and men with wives.

On a cheerier note, the Vancouver Sun's police affairs column, which is written by a working constable, this week described pulling over a taxi which was being driven erratically. The driver, it turned out, had been so absorbed in watching the action that was occurring in the back seat that he'd neglected to devote sufficient attention to driving the cab.

Also in the Vancouver Sun, a profile of one of Canada's first female drag-racing* drivers, Sylvia Braddick, who in the 1970s had a 1968 Dodge pickup truck which had been retrofitted with two 800hp Hemi engines. It had titanium pads on its rear end so that it would throw sparks when she did wheelstands, and they set it up so that nine-foot flames would jet from the headers of the alcohol-fuelled engines. Tres cool.







* = The kind where people drive automobiles really fast in a straight line, not the kind where men dressed as women compete to see who can run the fastest