A lot of people ask me what Norway is like. I tell them it is beautiful. It tell them it is secluded. I tell them it is my favorite place on earth. I tell them it is not Sweden. With respect to the economic crisis, I tell them Norway has hardly felt it. I also concede that it is expensive. The cost of living is high, but so is the quality of life, as confirmed by this article passed along by my father.
With my sister packing up for her imminent move to California, I caught the fever (perhaps not the best choice of words around here) and started going through some boxes of my own. I came across a copy of The Spokesman-Review that I picked up in the Spokane airport on our way to Chicago earlier this Summer. The issue, dated July 3, contained two articles that I had intended to pass along, and they are still just as interesting.
The first, which I could not find on the Spokesman’s website, was reporting on the same data as this story from the Idaho Statesman. They give some insightful speculations on why Idaho consistently ranks at or near the top of the list for new diagnoses of melanoma.
On a lighter note (no pun intended) came this short write-up about a marijuana arrest made in Central Washington. I am pretty sure I began laughing out loud on the plane when I came to the last line. You will have to scroll down to the story titled “Drug enforcers…”.
I am paging through Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) and stumble upon his discussion of viruses:
“They also have an unnerving capacity to burst upon the world in some new and startling form and then to vanish again as quickly as they came…
“It is sometimes called the Great Swine Flu epidemic and sometimes the Great Spanish Flu epidemic, but in either case it was ferocious. The First World War killed 21 million people in four years; swine flu did the same in its first four months. Almost 80 per cent of American casualties in the First World War came not from enemy fire, but from flu…
“Swine flu arose as a normal, non-lethal flu in the spring of 1918, but somehow, over the following months – no-one knows how or where – it mutated into something more severe. A fifth of victims suffered only mild symptoms, but the rest became gravely ill and many died. Some succombed within hours; others held on for a few days.
“In the United States, the first deaths were recorded among sailors in Boston in late August 1918, but the epidemic quickly spread to all parts of the country. Schools closed, public entertainments were shut down, people everywhere wore masks. It did little good. Between autumn 1918 and spring the following year, 548,452 people died of the flu in America. The toll in Britain was 220,000, with similar numbers in France and Germany. No-one knows the global toll, as records in the third world were often poor, but it was not less than twenty million and probably more like fifty million. Some estimates have put the global total as high as a hundred million.
“In an attempt to devise a vaccine, medical authorities conducted experiments on volunteers at a military prison on Deer Island in Boston Harbor. The prisoners were promised pardons if they survived a battery of tests. These tests were rigorous to say the least. First, the subjects were injected with infected lung tissue taken from the dead and then sprayed in the eyes, nose and mouth with infectious aerosols. If they still failed to succumb, they had their throats swabbed with discharges taken straight from the sick and dying. If all else failed, they were required to sit open-mouthed while a gravely ill victim was sat up slightly and made to cough into their faces.
“Out of – somewhat amazingly – three hundred men who volunteered, the doctors chose sixty-two for the tests. None contracted the flu – not one. The only person who did grow ill was the ward doctor, who swiftly died. The probable explanation for this is that the epidemic had passed through the prison a few weeks earlier and the volunteers, all of whom had survived the visitation, had a natural immunity.
“Much about the 1918 flu epidemic is understood poorly or not at all. One mystery is how it erupted suddenly, all over, in places separated by oceans, mountain ranges and other earthly impediments. A virus can survive for no more than a few hours outside a host body, so how could it appear in Madrid, Bombay and Philadelphia all in the same week?
“The probable answer is that it was incubated and spread by people who had only slight symptoms or none at all. Even in normal outbreaks, about 10 per cent of people in any given population have the flu but are unaware of it because they experience no ill effects. And because they remain in circulation they tend to be the great spreaders of the disease.
“That would account for the 1918 outbreak’s widespread distribution, but it still doesn’t explain how it managed to lie low for several months before erupting so explosively at more or less the same time all over. Even more mysterious is that it was most devastating to people in the prime of life. Flu normally is hardest on infants and the elderly, but in the 1918 outbreak deaths were overwhelmingly among people in their twenties and thirties. Older people may have benefited from resistance gained from an earlier exposure to the same strain, but why the very young were similarly spared is unknown. The greatest mystery of all is why the 1918 flu was so ferociously deadly when most flus are not. We still have no idea.”
