disease tagged posts

I’m ticked off this week. No getting around it; I am. But I’m also sad and frustrated.

As of April 11^th, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that there have been 555 confirmed cases of measles so far this year. That’s more than in all of 2018 (372) and the highest number since 2014 (667). Measles was declared “eliminated” in the U.S. in 2000, but that means the disease isn’t present all the time (or “endemic”), not that it doesn’t exist at all.

Travelers from countries where measles is still endemic bring cases into the U.S. every year. Usually, there are enough people who’ve been vaccinated around them that no one else catches the disease, or a few do, and then no one else does...

In the past few weeks, I’ve been hit with a number of medical issues. None were life-threatening but they were enough to really catch my attention. In addition, a friend did have a life-threatening condition—her kidneys failed—for which she’s now in treatment (dialysis). In my calmer moments, that got me thinking about how ordinary citizens interact with medicine beyond their own doctor’s office, including how the press covers medical research news.

Eggs are bad for you, right? No, wait, they’re good!

Need to lose weight? Which diet should you use: Atkins, paleo, Mediterranean, plant-based? They’re all based in science, aren’t they?

If you consume too much of such-and-such chemical, your chance of getting Cancer X will go up by 250%...

Last time I wrote about how we humans are terrible at comprehending really large and really small numbers. Check that: we can’t. And when we try, either the names for the numbers become just words we sling around, or our brains go TILT!

Unfortunately, scientists tend to work in arenas where they need very large and very small numbers to describe the scales of the objects they’re studying, from billions of light years to fractions of a micron.

That’s not the only obstacle science faces when trying to be relevant and understandable to the general public. Another is complexity. Here’s an example we can all relate to: the human body...

Ever had one of those story ideas that just wouldn’t leave you alone? Or woke you up in the middle of the night? Great, isn’t it? Writers love those ideas.

That’s how my debut novel, The Eternity Plague, got its start.

Sometime in the fall of 2003 (October, maybe?) I woke up early in the morning, thinking about what would happen if people suddenly became immortal, without having done anything to earn or deserve it. Finding the secret to immortality, only to discover there’s a high price to be paid for it, paying it, and then being left to wonder—for the rest of eternity—whether it was worth it or not is an old idea. Robert Silverberg told it in The Book of Skulls.

What kept me awake until I got up and wrote it down, however, was the twist of immortality just happening...