From the Wall Street Journal…..

You see them everywhere — nurses, doctors and medical technicians in scrubs or lab coats. They shop in them, take buses and trains in them, go to restaurants in them, and wear them home. What you can’t see on these garments are the bacteria that could kill you.

Dirty scrubs spread bacteria to patients in the hospital and allow hospital superbugs to escape into public places such as restaurants. Some hospitals now prohibit wearing scrubs outside the building, partly in response to the rapid increase in an infection called “C. diff.” A national hospital survey released last November warns that Clostridium difficile (C. diff) infections are sickening nearly half a million people a year in the U.S., more than six times previous estimates.

I never stopped to think about this issue before. But it does seem like doctors and nurses are awful lax about how they treat their scrubs.

From Fox News….

Damage to power grids and other communications systems could be catastrophic, the scientists conclude, with effects leading to a potential loss of governmental control of the situation.

The prediction is based in part on a major solar storm in 1859 that caused telegraph wires to short out in the United States and Europe, igniting widespread fires.

It was perhaps the worst in the past 200 years, according to the new study, and with the advent of modern power grids and satellites, much more is at risk.

“A contemporary repetition of the [1859] event would cause significantly more extensive (and possibly catastrophic) social and economic disruptions,” the researchers conclude.

Murphy’s law says that what can go wrong will go wrong. In other words, since the grid can go down, it is a mathematical certainty that it will go down given enough time.

Granted, it is theoretically possible that we could make the grid immune to the solar flare effect before next big storm comes along (whenever that will be). But I think it would be more realistic to count on pigs flying.

Just a reminder that life could turn into a horror story in a heart beat. From the International Herald Tribune…..

Virtually all the flu in the United States this season is resistant to the leading antiviral drug Tamiflu, and scientists and health officials are trying to figure out why.

The problem is not yet a public health crisis because this has been a below-average flu season so far and the chief strain circulating is still susceptible to other drugs — but infectious disease specialists are worried nonetheless.

Last winter, about 11 percent of the throat swabs from patients with the most common type of flu that were sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for genetic typing showed a Tamiflu-resistant strain. This season, 99 percent do.

“It’s quite shocking,” said Dr. Kent Sepkowitz, director of infection control at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “We’ve never lost an antimicrobial this fast. It blew me away.”

From the Telegraph….

Drugs used as a “chemical cosh” to placate Alzheimer’s patients in care homes double their chance of dying, a new study has shown.

From News Day….

Stony Brook University researchers looked at the brains of Bernstein and 16 other people who had been married an average of 20 years and claimed to be still intensely in love. They found that their MRIs showed activity in the same regions of the brain as those who had just fallen in love.

“It’s always been assumed that passionate love inevitably declines over time,” said Arthur Aron, a social psychologist at Stony Brook University and one of four authors of the study, presented in November at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

“But in survey after survey we always have these people who have been together a long time and say they are intensely in love. It was always chalked up to self-deception or trying to make a good impression,” he said.

This study suggests that’s not the case, said Bianca Acevedo.

From the Telegraph….

Children who regularly play outside are far less likely to become short-sighted, research has shown.

Makes sense to me. I will bet that is also at least part of the reason that adults start to become short sighted. Obviously, sunlight is not the only factor though.

From the Telegraph…

A man shot in the back 35 years ago has died of complications from the shooting, years after he was thought to have healed.

As usual with the Telegraph, they don’t tell you anything about this case that you really want to know. How did getting shot kill him after he live 30+ years in perfect health? Anyone find out more details let us know.