Danny and I played Pirates of the Spanish Main at Twistyland last night…

Dan checks out a line of sight Dan and I playing PotSM – 1/6/05

A view of an atoll with treasure. Dan and I playing PotSM 1/6/05

it was a lot of fun. Two excellent battles, and we each won one of them. We’ve discovered that it can be a lot more fun if we can assign “proxy crews” to allow both of us to have captains, and other shiphands.

The first Game, I just focused on scuttling his fleet, rather than taking treasure… the second, Danny bought a new deck, and we added “Lucky the Parrot” to the game… lots of good fun abounds. Twistyland’s back gaming area is nicely clean, and the people are quite friendly. (but not so friendly as to be intrusive.)

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Poor Mel is still not feeling well, but I foresee her getting better by Saturday. Monday, we’ll be back on track, methinks.

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NAIROBI (AFP) – A baby-hippopotamus that survived the tsumani waves on the Kenyan coast has formed a strong bond with a giant male century-old tortoise, in an animal facility in the port city of Mombasa, officials said.

The hippopotamus, nicknamed Owen and weighing about 300 kilograms (650 pounds), was swept down Sabaki River into the Indian Ocean, then forced back to shore when tsunami waves struck the Kenyan coast on December 26, before wildlife rangers rescued him.

“It is incredible. A-less-than-a-year-old hippo has adopted a male tortoise, about a century old, and the tortoise seems to be very happy with being a ‘mother’,” ecologist Paula Kahumbu, who is in charge of Lafarge Park, told AFP.

“After it was swept and lost its mother, the hippo was traumatized. It had to look for something to be a surrogate mother. Fortunately, it landed on the tortoise and established a strong bond. They swim, eat and sleep together,” the ecologist added.

“The hippo follows the tortoise exactly the way it follows its mother. If somebody approaches the tortoise, the hippo becomes aggressive, as if protecting its biological mother,” Kahumbu added.

“The hippo is a young baby, he was left at a very tender age and by nature, hippos are social animals that like to stay with their mothers for four years,” he explained.

In 2002, a barren Kenyan lioness made several attempts to play mother to baby antelopes, one of which ended with a rival lion making a meal out of the calf, and the others when rangers separated the animals.

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How infectious are dead bodies? Transmission of infection requires the presence of an infectious agent, exposure to that agent, and a susceptible host. It is, therefore, possible to characterize the infectious risk from dead bodies following a natural disaster by considering these elements.

The human body is host to many organisms, only some of which are pathogenic. When the body dies, the environment in which pathogens live can no longer sustain them. However, this does not happen immediately, and transmission of infectious agents from a cadaver to a living person may occur.

Infectious hazards for individuals who routinely handle cadavers include tuberculosis, group A streptococcal infection, gastroenteritis, transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease), hepatitis B, hepatitis C, HIV infection, and possibly meningitis and septicemia (especially meningococcal). Micro-organisms involved in the decay process (putrefaction) are not pathogenic.

Do victims of natural disasters have these infections when they die? Usually disaster victims die from trauma, burns, or drowning, and they are no more likely than the local population to have acute infections (meningitis and septicemia) or rare diseases (eg Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease).
Instead, where disease is present, it is far more likely to be due to chronic infections with blood-borne viruses (hepatitis B virus, hepatitis C virus, and HIV), enteric pathogens, and possibly Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Historically, epidemics resulting in mass casualties have only occurred from a few diseases, including plague, cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, anthrax, and smallpox. As previously noted, such infections are no more likely to be present in disaster victims than in the general population.

Furthermore, although some of these diseases are highly contagious, their causative agents are unable to survive long in the human body following death. It is, therefore, unlikely that such epidemics will result from contact with a cadaver.

Indeed, survivors present a much more important reservoir for disease. Where dead bodies have contaminated water supplies, gastroenteritis has been the most notable problem, although communities will rarely use a water supply where they know it to be contaminated by dead bodies.

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1 year ago – Goodies, bad phone, long meeting

2 years ago – waiting for doc, HMOs suck, Autopsy, memories

3 years ago – freesco, horkey my arm, make smudges, culture bound syndromes, stinky, live in the present, salt sticks

4 years ago – vagg, movies, napster