Please don't kiss the hedgehog

So that's why Sebastian was sick:

NYTimes reports: don't kiss your hedgehog, says the CDC, because you might get Salmonella.

and not just hedgehogs:

Hedgehogs are hardly the only pet known to spread disease. Pet reptiles are most commonly associated with passing salmonella to their owners, Dr. Sykes said. The same strain of the salmonella bacteria has also been associated with pet rodents and frogs, according to the C.D.C. And different strains of salmonella have been linked to pet bearded dragons, geckos, guinea pigs and turtles.

yeah. I had a patient who caught it from her pet turtle (from cleaning the aquarium and then not washing her hands enough to kill the germ).

cross posted to my main blog.

the black death: it decimated sub sahara Africa too

Science magazine:

"There was a deep, structural change in settlement patterns," Chouin says, just as the Black Death ravaged Eurasia and North Africa. With GLOBAFRICA funding, he has since documented a similar 14th century abandonment of Ife, Nigeria, the homeland of the Yoruba people, although that site was later reoccupied.

most of the literature on the black death is from England or western Europe, but it also decimated China, India and the Middle East.

I heard a lecture from somewhere that it was so bad in Egypt that they had a famine because there was not enough manpower to keep the irrigation systems unclogged.

One of these days I'll try to do this systemically, but alas I have so many interests that I doubt I will do it.