Health Information During a Time of Stress

Today's blog is a follow-up to last week's first part blog about "On Our Way to a Vaccine, which is based upon an excellent article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.  [ Entitled: "The Development of a Vaccine for COVID-19," June 14, 2020, Page 36-43, 56. ] So, from where we left off last week   - - - Dan Barouch says, "That still leaves the question as to how to get that [aforementioned ] gene into human cells." (1)  He suggests that one way to do this is a vector-based vaccine.  "A vector-based vaccine uses a delivery vehicle  --- one example would be a combined adenovirus, or a "harmless virus" carrier, like a common cold --- to deliver the protein into a person's cells." George Yancopoulos says, "This gene-based approach was used in the case of Ebola.  (2) " But Siddhartha Mukherjee further says, "There is also the idea of further ditching  "harmless virus" carrier (sic) altogether and just using ...

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...