Thursday, May 26, 2005
Checking in from Lazy Land – and I am not just referring to my life. You know you are in Thailand when a truck spraying pesticides specifically aimed at mosquitoes (there must be a word for that, like anti-mostiquaires) drives through your neighborhood and you welcome the potentially harmful fumes they spray because you read about an outbreak of dengue fever several days before – fortunately not near here. Incidentally, there is no vaccination against dengue, but there is one against hepatitis A that would have helped the five hundred people living in the north infected with it vectored by contaminated ice from one particular factory. Hep A results from ingesting trace amounts of feces. I can’t suppress the juvenile urge to use the word fecal factory, so there it is – the ice all came from a fecal factory. Enough scaremongering, outbreaks and contaminations can happen anywhere.