Health Information During a Time of Stress

Dr. David Ho currently is working at Columbia University with several colleagues to develop antiviral drugs. Ho was one of the premier researchers that helped to create the initial HIV cocktail that has saved hundreds of thousands. He is also good friends with Jack Ma, the CEO of China-based Alibaba.com, and who gave Ho's foundation a $2.1 - million dollar grant. When asked, what will the next global pandemic might be? he answered, "If you'd asked me that three or four months ago, I would have said influenza." The New Yorker author, Matthew Hutson, asks in this article (link below) "Could bacteria do us in?" Looking at human history outbreaks of various plagues and pandemics have killed millions. Amesh Adalja, Johns Hopkins researcher said: "Anti-biotics took bacteria off the table as a global biological risk for the most part."  He went on to say that  prions , which are responsible for mad cow disease are mostly avoidable by not eating

While I was self-quaratining [ I hope that's a real phrase]  I wondered what the actual name meant. And low and behold I was reading The New Yorker today, an article called "The Spread," by Elizabeth Kolbert and read that the  ". . . word "quarantine" comes from the Italian quaranta, meaning "forty." The article went on to say that the quarantine scenario has specific attributes that started long before people knew that they were practicing it. Most of Merriam-Webster's definition of quarantine has to do with ships coming into port; that irony was not lost on me. But Webster further states:   a restraint upon the activities or communication of persons or the transport of goods designed to prevent the spread of disease or pests. Kolbert states that the period of 40 days was required to stay safe. plus the number forty is constantly mentioned in the Bible, both in the Old and New Testaments. Items such as the numnber forty being days fo