More Stuff Contaminated with Germs!

Squads of people are culturing every inanimate object in sight. Here’s the latest from a microbiologist at the University of Arizona as published in USA Today. [There is no link to the actual study.] It seems the worst thing you can touch (this week) is a gas pump, with 71% of them contaminated with “germs most associated with a high risk of illness.” Next in line are corner mailboxes, ATM buttons, escalator rails, parking meters, crosswalk buttons and vending machines.

An expert, Ashley Templin, 26, a hair stylist at the Ezelli Salon in Detroit, was quoted. She said that the thought of germs is such a problem for her that she doesn’t “use public rest rooms.” She does not say what she does when she has to urinate. Perhaps she never drinks beer or like many women, she holds it forever.

I have blogged before about the burgeoning culture of culturing everything. I continue to point out that no one has linked outbreaks of disease to gas pump handles, neckties, cell phones or the myriad other inanimate objects that are being cultured left and right. If this were truly a huge problem, we would all be continuously incapacitated by infectious diseases.

The article recommends handwashing, which of course is good advice.

What should we culture next? I suggest elevator buttons, movie theater seats, newsstands, car door handles, petting zoos and sewage treatment plants. Can you think of other things to culture?

Bad News For MDs. Researchers Work on Vocabulary for Chronic Pain

Just released on Science Daily is the news that psychiatrists in Buffalo are working on a project to enable chronic pain sufferers to better describe what they are feeling. The docs are using ontology, the branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of existence or being as such. Metaphysics is sometimes called philosophy, especially in its more abstruse branches. [Definitions are from Dictionary.com.]

Here is a quote from the Science Daily article:

"The philosophical definition of ontology is the study of things that exist and how they relate to each other," says [Werner] Ceusters, who also is director of the Ontology Research Group of UB's New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences. "I am a person and you are a person so we share something. Suppose I drop dead. What lies on the floor? Is that still a person? If it is no longer a person, is it still the very same thing that was sitting here as a person but now is a corpse?"

If you can explain that quote to me, I would certainly appreciate it.

Someone must understand it because the group has received an NIH grant of $793,571 to study the subject.

You may have no idea how many chronic pain sufferers there are. I do. For fibromyalgia [also known as chronic widespread pain syndrome] alone, 17% of a population in a published study from England had it. In my blog on the paper, I pointed out that at the rate people were developing the syndrome, 50% will have it by the year 2033.

Honestly, I do not see standardizing a vocabulary for pain based on ontology leading to anything good.