In the United States,
National Asthma Day. I have gathered some articles on asthma. In the
United States, asthma disproportionately affects children of African
ancestry. Is it a poverty issue, a genetic issue, both? Articles have
been produced claiming both. The fact is, if your child can't breathe in
the middle of the night, you really don't care.
What can you do
to lessen the frequency of asthma attacks? Keep your house obsessively
clean. no dust, no curtains, no carpets, books behind glass, get rid of
anything that will attract cockroaches.
I have posted articles in MJoTA.org. To read more from the NIH, click here, data from the CDC published by the Office of Minority Health, click here and about how household intervention can help children with asthma, click here.
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Today is May Day.
May
is the month of continuing miracles. All is green, flowers are
continuing to bloom, tomato plants are finally looking like tomatoes
will be produced.
May is the month America gets impatient with
summer starting in June. "Damn it", I hear echoing through the
centuries, "end of June? You have got to be kidding, my summer is
starting at the end of May, Memorial Day." Hey, that works for me, and
for my town, my swimclub opens its doors at the end of May. I have paid
the annual fee, oiled my bicycle, made sure my tennis racket and
basketball hands are in working order.
That is May Day for me now.
A
long time ago, in Germany, in 1941, when the German government had an
official policy of equating Jews with vermin, a young Jewish woman gave
birth to a boy on May Day.
Because of miracles that happen when
people pay attention, the young woman survived the war, and the boy grew
up to become a prolific inventor.
Later than most men, he
became the father of a boy and a girl. I have the great privilege of
being their mother. Happy 71st birthday Lothar.
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Picture above, me in Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany in Feb 2006 in front of the Women's Hospital in the huge hospital complex where I was a guest scientist from Mar to May 1986.
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Read the constantly updated news on health from the CDC, FDA and NIH, click here.
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Above, Wikipedia conference I attended in Manhattan, January 2011.
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Listen to the story of Lothar's mother, Ruth, click here, or click on the picture of Lothar on the left, the man with thick white hair fiddling with a camera.
--------------------------------May 1, 1941. Citizen Kane was first shown in New York. That is the good news. Two British ocean liners were sunk, General Rommel invaded Tobruk, and the citizens in Liverpool awoke to devastation, the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) had started dropping bombs, and continued for the next 6 nights.
The head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering, was also second in command of the Nazi empire, on May 1, 1941, he signed a law called Einsatzstab Rosenberg, which was a directive for theft of anything that looked valuable in countries that were occupied by Germany.
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May 1, 1986. I had met Lothar the previous week, on April 25, on Anzac Day, and the Black Forest spring was intoxicating.
In that week I traveled to Essen for 2 days to visit Professor Gerolf Gros and stay with his family. He showed me around Essen, around Albert Speers mansion, and in the evening I drank red wine with him and his wife.
The next day, April 30, I had a splitting headache, and I called Lothar from a train station. He told me that I needed to know that red wine that comes from north of Frankfurt should never, ever be consumed. Ah! And in the evening we partook in the German ritual of eating spargel - freshly harvested white asparagus.
May 1 is a holiday in Germany, and Lothar held a party. A lovely party, filled with keen skiiers who saw Spring as a necessary evil between decent snowfalls. A lot of teh discussion was about Chernobyl, because during that week the nuclear reactor had malfunctined, and started spewing out radioactivity, some of it eventually landed on Germany. I was going back to Philadelphia the next day for a week after 2 months in Freiburg, and would return for a conference in Titiisee, high in the Black Forest.
I remember 2 party members rather liking each other's company after the wife of one of them left the party; and Lothar staying up all night talking to them to prevent them connecting intimately in his house. In the morning, Lothar piled me and my luggage into his Audi and drove me with the couple to the train station. He walked with me into the train, and as I looked out of the window and waved him goodbye, I saw the couple connecting inappropriately against a wall. Well, not in his house.
I returned to Freiburg a week later, and many more times over the next 12 years. Lothar was so strong, so principled, so competent.
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Biafra audio. Listen to speeches by General Ojukwu and the Biafran national anthem. Click here.
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