It’s flu, but not as we know it
Filed under: Environment, General, Life, Medical Breakthroughs
Well, a few years ago, it looked like avian flu was going to be the great pandemic that would lay waste to the world’s population. Experts debated it, newspapers wrote billions of words on it, and a whole generation of children stopped picking up feathers. As the pandemic failed to materialize, however, gradually the fear subsided.
Is that pig safe?
Now a new flu has suddenly emerged, and it’s spreading fast. There have already been some 80 deaths in Mexico from swine flu, and cases in the US and New Zealand. Now there’s a suspected case in Israel, of an Israeli who has just returned from Mexico.
With the World Health Organization declaring the disease a “public health event of international concern”, with “pandemic potential”, flu is once more the hot disaster story of the season, making rather a nice change from Iran.
Anti-viral drug Tamiflu is being touted as an answer, but Israel also has a possible alternative – Sambucol. This herbal extract has been on the market for years, selling well in the US and in over 17 countries around the world as a remedy for flu.
The herbal remedy, made from elderberry, was developed by Dr. Madeleine Mumcuoglu, a world-renowned Israeli virologist, and is said to cut the duration and severity of flu by up to half.
In 2006, a British medical research institute ran cell culture tests (clinical trials were off the agenda for obvious reasons), and announced that it was 99% effective against the avian flu virus, H5N1.
A year earlier, another study showed that the remedy was not just effective against human and avian flu, but also swine flu as well. Of course at that time no one really cared about flu from pigs.
I interviewed Mumcuoglu after the 2006 tests, and she told me then that it didn’t really matter where the flu originated. “Our research has shown that the antiviral effect of Sambucol is not strain-specific. It was effective against all influenza viruses tested,” she said.
“If you stop the flu virus at the beginning then you stop it going to the lungs, or from creating the additional complications that are normally the cause of death,” she added.
Now we have still to see what actually happens with swine flu. Newspapers love to scare the public, and the public apparently loves to be scared.
In Mexico, the government is recommending that people stop going to public places, kissing friends, or shaking friends with colleagues. Though I’m clearly no expert, if swine flu one day reaches your community, maybe it’s not such a bad idea to also try taking Sambucol as well – just in case.
Come Out To DC Film Event To See Where Young American Journalists Meet Israel In “The Editors”
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence
They couldn’t have come at a more dangerous time. Six university newspaper editors from America visited Israel for the first time last December, and the already planned trip happened to coincide with the first week of the recent Gaza Conflict.
In a reality style documentary, the young Americans had their week-long visit taped by a camera crew hired by Project Interchange, a Washington-based organization that develops seminars for Americans and international guests in Israel. The film is being screened tomorrow at Georgetown University.
In Israel, the editors, including Georgetown’s The Hoya newspaper editor Andrew Dubbins, met with a wide range of leaders and citizens in an attempt to get beyond the headlines to learn the complexities of the Middle East peace process.
(Vadim Lavrusik, Editor-in-Chief and Co-Publisher, The Minnesota Daily, University of Minnesota)
The documentary was written and directed by Patrick Ryan Morris from Project Interchange, and features Dubbins, along with other editors who were in Israel from December 30th to January 5th.
“I was an editor of a newspaper in college,” says Morris. “From that experience, I know that you cannot bring journalists to Israel, or anywhere for that matter, and force an ideology on them or a version of the truth.”
He hopes to screen the film at campuses throughout the United States.
Project Interchange brings new delegations of “influentials” to Israel twice a month from around the world. Muslim leaders from France came to a seminar in Israel in December, meeting Israeli President Shimon Peres and the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. In November, women executives from the U.S. construction business enjoyed a week-long seminar. Before that, European environment leaders were in Israel. Each group of guests enjoy tailor-made trips, adapted to their interests and expertise.
The world premiere of the The Editors, the film, will take place tomorrow evening – April 20th at 8:00 pm, at Georgetown University’s ICC Auditorium. The screening will be followed by a wrap party at Cafe St. Ex.
For more details and a map of how to get there, see The Editors on Facebook.
For more about Project Interchange, see the ISRAEL21c feature story on the organization.
Jpost McCartney coverage is pretty McAwesome
So as I write this over 50,000 people have decent upon HaYarkon Park to hear Paul McCartney perform. I love the Beatles as much as the next guy, I really wish I was there, but alas, I could not justify the absurdly high ticket price. Am I regretting the decision? Yeah, a bit. The 490 NIS (roughly $150) won’t mean anything a year from now but there are still lighting fixtures that need to be installed in our apartment, a mini-fake kitchen I need to build for my daughter, a garden that needs to be tended, etc. You get the idea. There won’t ever be another band like the Beatles, and I won’t be able to tell my kids one day that I saw one of the Beatles perform. Though I did see Brian Wilson perform Pet Sounds in London a few years ago and that was pretty spectacular. So at least I got to see one music legend in my life.
Coverage of this show has been out of control. I think McCartney is getting more coverage than the Pope’s visit to Israel back in 2000.
The Jerusalem Post’s coverage has been enjoyable. It’s had a real giddy tone to it. Editor in chief David Horowitz interview with McCartney was obviously a personal career highlight for him and his uber-excited tone and enthusiasm jumps right off the page. A few of the recent headlines:
• Analyze This: How McCartney could rock Ahmadinejad’s world (actually an excellent opinion piece)
• McCartney’s concert kicks off in TA
My fellow Israelity blogger David even dared to bring up the old myth of Paul McCartney’s death and replacement with an impostor (Paul rebuffed this in yesterday’s press conference, which certainly made David’s day).
Marketing ritual as family values
In Israel, Fridays are similar to European and North American Sundays in many ways, a key one being the extra-thick newspaper. When Israel Israeli sits down to watch soccer on TV and spit sunflower seeds into his Turkish coffee regs, nothing makes for better reading material than a multi-kilo pile of not-quite-dry ink on super-thin paper containing hyper-local news tidbits, the following week’s TV highlights, in-depth feature articles illustrated with full-page photos, a circular outlining the latest cosmetics on sale at SuperPharm and fliers selling religious ritual to the presumably uninitiated.
Statistics have been said to indicate that the Passover Seder is Judaism’s most popular ritual (I know, it does seem odd that it would beat out henna parties, the Fast of Gedalia and upsheirin), so it makes sense that on the Friday preceding Passover, an advertising-laden Hagadah gets included in the pile. But this week, the Yediot tabloid included a Shabbat Kiddush flier insert that not only touted the sanctity of the Friday night family meal but also included the relevant liturgical text.
It’s not clear what kind of market research went into this initiative, nor what religiously coercive organizations were secretly involved (a comment on the flier here notes that Yediot publisher Nachi Dankner’s Supersol supermarkets are currently engaged in a stiff competition with Shefa Shuk, a chain which has made some enemies in the ultra-Orthodox world), but the sales pitch angle is an interesting one.
The flier doesn’t focus on man’s ritual obligations to his Maker, nor on the mystical attributes of the seventh day. Rather, what’s being sold here is happy, wholesome family time. In Israel, even for the secular, Shabbat (and the Friday night dinner that ushers it in) is a time when we surround ourselves with the people and tasks that really matter: taking it easy with the immediate clan. The smiling mother, children and wine goblet-wielding father sit at a table that’s in a “reserved” parking space, and the headline reads “Friday [night] is reserved for family.” It’s not easy for one’s heart to remain unwarmed.
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