Current Hong Kong Time: 5:20 AM
I can never seem to sleep the night before a big flight. It's as though my body knows in advance to prepare for jetlag. Anyway, here I am before you, blogging. In 8 hours I'll be on a plane to San Francisco.
At home, nothing much has changed. I've been sick and in bed. Mom and Dad are great and made all of my favorite dishes, yesterday for dinner. It was the best dinner ever, and I ate until I was near-exploding. This may or may not have contributed to my sleeplessness.
That said, I still have plenty of time to blog. . . and little to blog about. So, I thought I'd comment on a few news items. I've recently become addicted to Google News which, as with all of Google's other projects has yet to disappoint. I've also been reading a lot of commentary from the Cardinal Collective, which is fantastic. Anyway, I've been following two items of interest: the whole BSE scare and the terrorism alerts lately and have a few comments.
On BSE. As a biochemist, I have a lingering academic interest in what happens with the whole mad cow scare. It's not that I am interested in the epidimeology of the disease, but that I'm interested in how the US government is responding to a medical crisis and how much information about the disease they are actually passing on to the lay public.
Like the human version of the disease, vCJD, bvCJD can be a spontaneous occurence in the nervous tissue of affected cases. This fact is however less than reassuring to the American public as they bite into their umpteenth McDonald's hamburger. In fact, along with consumption of tainted feed, the cow may have been exposed to the infectious prion in other ways as well. That the disease takes years to develop and the rates of tranmission are dreadfully low makes the whole scenario a nightmare for epidimeologists. Instead of simply telling the public that they have no damn clue what's going on, the government persists in telling the public the best news it can. It's tracing back the lineage of the affected cow, to Canada, and playing a classic game of kindergarten point-the-finger. It, when the news first broke, insisted that the meat hadn't entered the food supply, now an obvious lie. The only real affect that all this posturing has, however, is to make the public more worried about eating beef than it really should be. Admittedly, the disease is a very frightening one, that turns your brain to mush, but unless, as one friend put it, "you eat cow brains as a delicacy", the chance of becoming infected is absolutely minimal especially if you eat non-CNS tissues (which is very likely). You're probably more likely to get salmonella from your Christmas eggnog. It makes for great media coverage, but what wouldn't?
The second thing I wanted to comment on is this whole orange alert thing. Now that the US has required some foreign carriers to host military, I'm not even sure I want to fly. Again, this is a case of the media making something sound bigger than it really is. It's sad that the US is such a major world power that the rest of the world must kowtow to it's demands.
OK, I have to go pack now. I'll say more later.
--C.