Archive | Disease

11 January 2013

Flu season… it’s gettin’ ugly

If you’ve been noticing fewer people at work or at the gym, it’s not your imagination. We’re getting nailed with a particularly bad flu season this winter. (If you want to see how scary it is, go here and see how the map changes in the past two months.) It’s gotten so bad that Boston [...]

Continue Reading

24 April 2012

The evils of… sitting

You workout on a regular basis, you watch what you eat, you don’t smoke, you don’t drink excessively…. You know what, you are so good to your body that you should kick back and relax a little bit. Why not have a seat? A-HA! You fell for it. (I knew you treated your body like [...]

Continue Reading

22 January 2012

Paula Deen’s down-home… and diabetic

For years, Paula Deen has been using her southern charm to convince us that proper nutrition has no place in the kitchen. Although she preaches moderation, there’s nothing about her butter-, flour-, and sugar-laden cooking that backs this message up. Now it appears that biology has caught up with Paula. She has come out of [...]

Continue Reading

11 December 2009

It’s vaccination time!

Good news. From the New York State website: Governor David A. Paterson today announced that, effective immediately, health care providers may make the H1N1 flu vaccine available to all New Yorkers who want the vaccine, including those who are not in priority groups established by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). If [...]

Continue Reading

22 September 2009

Hand-washing might not help

As we gear up for a flu season, with H1N1 now in the mix, we’re being advised to wash our hands on a regular basis. Bad news. Research from the Netherlands “suggests that the H1N1 flu travels mostly by air, not via hand-to-hand contact—and therefore won’t be prevented through hand-washing.”  This is not to say [...]

Continue Reading

02 September 2009

Personal Space Protector

“PERSONAL SPACE is an object classified as ‘functional art’, created by the Brazilian artist and inventor Vivian Puxian. It ensures your personal space is always kept safe, and protects you against infectious and contagious diseases, such as the swine flu.” Get onto the subway during rush hour with one of these things, and swine flu [...]

Continue Reading

24 July 2009

Beach sand, fun but yucky.

Next time your stomach doesn’t agree with you after a day at the beach, don’t blame that hot dog that you ate. It could have been the sand. A recent study in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that people who played in beach sand were more likely to get some form intestinal disease. More [...]

Continue Reading

27 April 2009

Tracking the Swine Flu

Are we headed for another 1918 pandemic? Let’s hope to God not. Perhaps it’s too soon to be worried, but we definitely should be concerned. To view a regularly updated (and somewhat disturbing) map of all the reported cases of H1N1 infections, check out Google Maps. New York City is shown above, but you can [...]

Continue Reading