It seems as if Plague Days are with us again. Deadly viruses like Ebola lurk in the jungles threatening, like AIDS, to emerge and kill us by the million. Bacteria mutate and leap across species boundaries causing international epidemics that kill us in the thousands. Our friends the animals infect us, turn our brains to mush and the fear of Frankenfoods, human clones and/or cyberman spans the globe.
Are things really this bad? Not really.
Do we need to be concerned? Yes, to a degree. We have not yet returned to the days when the Black Death wiped out a third of Europe’s population, the Bubonic Plague ravaged the world and the great ‘flu epidemic of 1918 killed 20 million people. The combination of hygiene and medical knowledge make that unlikely. However, science run riot combined with unprincipled and unconscious Big Biz could have some very nasty surprises in store for us if we let them. As we should know by now, a pissed-off Gaia can outdo any manmade mayhem with little more than a shrug of her shoulders.
In the greater sense, if we know what’s good for us, we have to live much more in harmony with Nature. If that means not feeding ground-up sheep brains to cows, who are herbivores to earn a few extra dollars, not to mention stuffing them full of hormones and antibiotics, then that is a good thing.
Fact is, worldwide SARS has only infected some 2,500 people and killed under 80, most of those in Hong Kong and Guangchou. On any one day in these places, that’s a lot less than the number killed by ordinary upper respiratory infections, people killed on the roads or from smoking cigarettes. That being said, it makes sense to avoid crowds and confined spaces, being scrupulous about personal hygiene and wearing a mask in crowded places. The best kind of mask, by the way, is not a surgical one but an industrial mask for dust or asbestos.
Other than that, far and away the best thing you can do is to enhance your immune system. You do this primarily by not compromising it, leading a healthy lifestyle, reasonable exercise, good diet and not becoming paranoid about the wicked world we inhabit. You also need to build up your immune system so that it can fight off most anything coming its way.
Here, very briefly are some of the most effective ways of doing this.
Taking a Grade A multi-nutrient formulation is fundamental. It must have sufficient vitamins A, C and E with trace elements zinc, copper, manganese and selenium; a good whey protein (lactoferrin) concentrate (watch out: most products calling themselves colustrum are not going to do much for you); the herbs echinacea, goldenseal and elderberry (Sambucol) are all potent herbal antibiotics, each working in different ways. You can take them preventatively for up to 3 weeks at a time or in big doses when you have an infection. Other herbs that help overall are ginseng and grape seed extract. A thymic glandular complex like Thymic Protein A can really boost things; as can the hormones DHEA and melatonin. Other key nutrients for the immune system are CoQ10 and L-Carnitine. One other natural patented product that has been shown to be particularly effective in preventing infection is MGN3 (rice bran extract or Arabinoxylane). And lastly the French drug Biostim is effective in preventing serious respiratory infection and once you’ve got it, the drug Ribavirin. Thing is, you need to know about these two drugs and when to use them because most doctors don’t.
Poor Little Belgium!
What do we know about Belgium other than great chocolate and Hercule Poirot? That great culinary combination moule et frites, perhaps? Less savoury and less well known is the nastiest episode of European colonialism ever. In the Belgian Congo, as it was known from the mid 19thC. until the 1960’s, some of the worst cases of genocide, greed and exploitation were perpetrated in the interests of a despicable monarch and the name of “Belgian Civilisation”, if there is such a thing.
For the British the casus belli in the Great War was the vision of a defenseless Belgium depicted as a comely half dressed woman about to suffer a fate worse than death at the hands of three German officers representing the Teutonic horde, who had crossed the Rhine to roast babies over the campfire on the tips of their bayonets. Played well in the tabloids of the day and pretty soon the flower of England’s youth were on their way to foreign fields waved on by their mothers and sweethearts to save fair Belgium from the beastly Hun.
“ We don’t want to see you go, but we think you should..... “, the posters urged.
Thanks to the dreadful bloodbath that ensued and other wars that followed, our attitude to war has changed a bit. We don’t buy the stuff our governments feed us in quite the way we used. But the gutter press hasn’t changed much and nor has the taste of our rulers for propaganda. Less lurid perhaps, and nowadays dignified in macho-military parlance as “Psy Ops”.
So what are we to make of the picture of gallant little Belgium leading the charge in denouncing the war in Iraq, proposing spoiling motions against it in the UN and preventing NATO from supporting it’s co-member Turkey?
Punching way above it’s weight one would have thought.
Is the Belgian government now made up of principled pacifists? I’d like to think so, but in view of a particularly squalid record in the past few years, somehow I doubt it. I suspect the French are wagging the tail of this particular doggie.
I forgot to mention one other famous Belgian speciality. Beer, especially strong beer. Apparently the French, at their mercantilist best and to foster the free flow of goods within the EC, had enacted a law imposing a swingeing 40% duty on imported beverages over a certain alcoholic content. Had the tax been imposed it would have had a very serious effect on Belgian exports to France. But a short while ago the French government decided that they didn’t actually mean to include Belgian beer in this after all. It was just about the time that Belgium was cutting such an uncharacteristic and muscular dash in the UN and the corridors of NATO. I know Belgians are famous for their appetite for rich food and drink, but could this really all be about BEER?!
If Tony Blair is derided by the French and other Continentals as “Bush’s poodle”, what does that make Belgium? Actually, anyone who knows anything about poodles knows that they are substantial animals, among the brightest of hunting dogs and far removed from the Gallic poodle, that minituarised, primped and clipped courtesan’s accessory that I suspect the French have in mind when referring to our Tony. If there were an International Tribunal for Crimes Against Canines the French would surely be in the dock for what they’ve done to the dignity of such a noble animal, and I don’t mean Blair.
So if we are making doggy analogies, at the risk of upsetting the Welsh, I’d liken the Belgian government to an overfed and ill-tempered corgi with a low centre of gravity.
But wait! Am I not forgetting something? What about Albert Schweitzer and his mission of mercy in the Congo?
I’m not absolutely sure about this, but wasn’t he an Alsatian.....?
Make My Day........
Closer to home, I emerged from my house the other day walking the few yards down the quiet leafy lane to where my office is, when I felt a strange and persistent tugging at my shoulder. Startled from my walking meditation I became aware that a man on a motorbike had the other end of the strap of my shoulder satchel. In those long moments of violent action, like slo-mo, with the strap halfway down my arm it flashed through my mind it was my Rasta pal Miles down the road playing a bad joke on me. I straightened my arm not to resist and was just about to say “Aw c’mon, Miles....” when I saw clearly my assailants were two punk kids on a bike. Too late to resist, by this time they were off and round the corner with my bag and me thundering after them, cursing myself and them, all the while bellowing “Stop Thief! Stop Thief! Maling! Maling!”. The few passers-by looked on in petrified amazement at the sight. As the villains sped off into the distance a taxi pulled up and a middle-aged German tourist lady leaned out,
“ Excuse me, do you speak English?”, she enquired politely.
“ Not Now!”, I snarled “Can’t you see I’ve just been robbed...?”
“ No, no”, she said, “the same thing happened to me yesterday, right here. They were the same boys. Du must go right back to your hotel and have them take you to the police to report it”, she bossed.
Steam still coming out my ears I obeyed and went down to the local police station with one of our house staff to report the crime. It was a scene from any cop shop, anywhere in the world. Disinterested policemen, some in uniform some not, lounged about the report room smoking cigarettes and ogling their female colleagues or any other young woman in the precinct, while one of their number laboriously tapped out their reports with two fingers on a clapped-out typewriter. An English tourist was in front of us. He had left his briefcase in his car in the carpark at Makro and had had it nicked while inside. We exchanged brief, rueful pleasantries.
“ Don’t forget to give ‘em a backhander”, he advised on his way out.
Before my own typing marathon commenced the policeman talked rapidly in Indonesian to my companion.
“ He wants you to know that their are two kinds of report”, she said. “One is not a crime and lasts half-an-hour and could cost Rp250,000. The other is for a crime and is free but will take 3 hours. He wants to know which one you want?
I settled for the half-hour report and a negotiated “fee” of Rp 20,000, bit like a donation to the Policemen’s Sports Club in other cop shops in other climes I ‘spose.
Back home I cancelled my credit cards and an hour later got a call from the VISA people in Hong Kong asking me if I had been using my VISA card in a supermarket in Denpasar?
“ DID THEY GIT THEM?!”, vengeful hope surging in my blood.
No such luck, the kids had just got in a quick purchase within minutes of the dastardly deed and a computer thousands of miles away in another country had picked it up as an ‘unlikely’ purchase. They didn’t even know that the card had been reported stolen. Amazing how fast some things work.....
So now when I go out and about my radar is way out. My new “satchel”, a computer bag, is firmly slung across my body and away from the street. Especially when I go to the money changer. On hitting the pavement I puff myself up like a demented Schwartznegger and glare menacingly at every passing motorcyclist, just daring them to make my day.....
