@edps
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My cereal brekkie consists of two dessert spoons of oats, two of oat bran and 3/4 dessert spoon of wheat bran. Add water/milk/soy milk to just about cover and nuke (watching carefully) at 800 watts for 30-60secs until the milk just starts to foam up. Leave to cool for a bit (its bleeding hot!) then top with more cold milk etc, and a sprinkle of salt or other goodies such as seeds/currents to your taste. If I’m in a hurry I eat without cooking Muesli style. Btw do NOT get conned into buying expensive ‘microwave’ oats: ordinary oats microwave in exactly the same way and cost a quarter of the price!
If you prefer a cold breakfast then mix up the oats, bran and milk and leave to steep overnight, top up with milk in the morning and eat.
Bran reduces bowel transit time (supposedly a good thing) and bulks up the stools. I mix different brans as oat bran is a ‘soluble’ fibre that feeds the bugs in the lower intestine, while wheat bran is insoluble and supposedly scours nasties from the colon.
As you note, this changes hard little bullets into larger more comfortable soft logs! I found that it also eliminated my IBS over time.
Although the real origin of Snake Flu is a hypothesis, this article traces the possible link between bats, snakes and humans.
Bays (mostly fruit bats) are known to be a causal agent for numerous diseases. Although some Asian peoples eat fruit bats this is not a widespread habit. The main link is bats roosting in fruit trees, dropping half eaten fruit and then defecating over it. The fruit is then consumed by foraging pigs, and then on to humans via either bad hygiene or cooking practices. IIrc in Malaysia in the late 90s the pig carcasses directly infected some of the food preparers via cuts/hands touching lips etc. In the Malaysia case I think chickens were also contaminated so muddying the waters in establishing a chain of events.
I think we need to put the Snake flu panic in context. Bird flu pandemics have a death rate of around 2.5%, and similar proportion of serious cases. So Snake Flu is bad in terms of its spread rate and probably higher death rate, but it is certainly no Ebola, SARS or Smallpox in its lethality.
The Snake Flu pandemic will also have tech impacts in the short/medium term due to the city-wide lockdowns and people extending their New Year holiday. El Reg identifies SSD and Nand manufacturers that could be badly hit.
The map is interesting as based on early info each confirmed case has generated two to three additional ones. That leaves it uncertain whether symptomless contagious victims also infect two or three others. Regardless of this, we can obviously expect growth in each red dot as well as a lot of new ones.
Off-line backup is always a good idea. Now that USB3 128Gb memory sticks cost < £15 there really is no excuse not to just copy over all your personal files.
I cannot disagree with your view that we only have a snapshot. However I tend to think <5% deaths is likely as the current death rate is mainly from a swamped Wuhan infrastructure which is as close as you can get to simulating a pandemic.
One caveat is that the virus does not learn to be more efficient. If Bird Flu is used as an analogue, death rates climbed as human-human infections progressed. Lets hope that Snake Flu does not behave in a similar fashion.
Well our half-assed Government have at last realised that returnees should not make their own way home by public transport etc and then self-quarantine having visited the nearest supermarket to stock up on supplies. They will now be quarantined on one of our many redundant Army bases.
I guess we should be grateful that it only took our Government a week to realise their stupidity! We certainly cannot throw stones at the Chinese for their efforts.
I guess in future we will be relying more on our own resources to uncover Government stupidities as the BBC have been forced to slash their journalistic news gathering. (Censorship in a subtle form!)
Lundy would be a better location for 400+++ people.
Today’s WHO report states that 80% of snake flu cases are mild. The other 20% they classify as severe. Deaths are running around 2.5%. The Global risk level is now placed at high.
Australia are going to put all their evacuees from China on Christmas Island for a couple of weeks. The UK Government of course are still pratting about.
The password is independent of yours – it could be anything. Instructions for password resetting are here: BT Link
Obviously use your wife’s details for email address etc.
Iirc the main holder of the BT email account (you?) may have other reset options.
Bob the logic goes that if there is so much intelligent life around us, why have we not detected it or had them visit us. The (imo) somewhat flawed logic ignores that we have only been broadcasting a signal into space for a short time (and I can see much of that signal soon being gobbled up into other technologies e.g. fibre). It also ignores the ‘filter’ of interstellar travel – FTL travel has to be solved to have visitors.
I will miss his Chairmanship of ‘Just a Minute’, but no doubt someone else/something will take his place. Mutatis mutandis rules again.
I suspect that the Chinese have done a lot of research on the origin of SARS and had firmly identified a Wet Market link. (Fruit bats and things we would not consider edible are kept and slaughtered in such places). As soon as they identified a novel virus especially if in a wet market trader they would quickly know to isolate their problem area.
Check out the family tree I posted earlier, it shows the relationship with Bat origin viruses and the general rodent (murine) family .
For once I would not be quick to seize on a conspiracy theory as the Wuhan Chinese appear contrite that they had not appreciated the scale of the problem more quickly.
[edit] the Reuters piece identifying the difficulties the Mayor had in coming clean do not surprise me. It is typical of any authoritarian Government, and we have similar though hopefully lesser problems with our own!
Cannot add edits with links!
For those interested the genetic family tree of Snake Flu can be found here.
My explainitory edit disappeared. ‘Wet’ does not mean fish even though fish are sold from large aquariums. Wet is better thought of as running with blood due to all the slaughtering that takes place in very unsanitary conditions.
Not sure about ‘engineered’. Such things are possible, but early DNA analysis identified snake sequences – hence Snake Flu, and the Chinese have been quick to close the Wet Markets where snakes and other things are kept and slaughtered alongside chickens, pigs etc. (The Chinese like meat to be super fresh!). As both pigs and birds together with humans are flu vectors it is quite possible that bad hygiene mixed up snake fluids with those of birds/pigs or coughing/sneezing humans.
A Chinese wet market is quite a horrific place to visit and would quickly turn most sensitive Westerners into vegans!
SARS apparently originated in similar circumstances.
The Scientific American gives the happy news that Snake Flu is probably here to stay just like all the many varieties of Bird Flu.
The article also says that the induction period between infection and getting very ill may be as short as four days, which is why US experts think it impossible to contain the virus by tracking contacts.
Now I guess we just have to wait to see how the virus mutates within the human community – sometimes they become relatively benign as was the case with Scarlet Fever, sometimes the converse.
The probably good news is that provided the Chinese and South Asian governments close Wet Markets and ban the butchering of snakes to stop new flu varieties forming, it should be easier to develop a vaccine to eliminate it.
None the less, I am stopping away from take-aways and making my own fake-aways 😉 🙂
+1 almost certainly cheaper and better!
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