In honor of my friends who are going to Australia on their honeymoon today

Came across this piece of news yesterday:

100,000 dead bats fall from the sky in Australia

A heat wave in the state of Queensland that has temperatures rising above 109 degrees Fahrenheit caused nearly 100,000 bats to just fall from the sky and forced some unfortunate reporter to write the following sentence:

"About 100,000 bats have fallen from the sky and died during a heatwave in Australia that has left the trees and earth littered with dead creatures."

Oh, and also this one:

"The stench from the rotting carcasses has begun to disturb residents of Brisbane and large towns. Authorities have dispatched rubbish collectors to pick up thousands of carcasses from populated areas."

Watch your head out there! Also: Do not eat.

Welcome to spinsterhood

You know what I learned yesterday? That I have an old lady name. Look at this graph of the number of babies named "Jessica" over the years:

This means that when I'm old, all the Jessicas in the country are also going to be old. Jessica is the new Gertrude! Egad!

I'd better start working on my "kids these days..." complaints.

This is going to give me nightmares

According to some website I've never heard of, this is the world's most dangerous trail. It's in China. It takes you up the tippy top of a mountain...to a teahouse. Tea sure seems worth risking death to me!

Even if it's not the most dangerous trail in the world, it certainly seems like a good contender:

La la la, no safety railing, no big deal.

Just hang on to the chain and hope your backpack doesn't bang into the side of the mountain, sending you off balance...you'll be fine.

Sandals are perfect footwear for this excursion.

Oh, and then there's the part where you climb straight up the side of the mountain.

I wonder how many people plunge to their deaths on this trail every year. When I visited the Grand Canyon as a teenager, and refused to hike down the trail from the rim, even for an hour, and consequently spent a few hours waiting in the gift shop for my group to finish their hike, I learned that 3-4 people fall of the Grand Canyon every year. And the path there is SO much wider.

From Wikipedia:

Huashan has historically been a place of retreat for hardy hermits, whether Daoist, Buddhist or other; access to the mountain was only deliberately available to the strong-willed, or those who had found "the way". With greater mobility and prosperity, Chinese, particularly students, began to test their mettle and visit in the 1980s. The inherent danger of many of the exposed, narrow pathways with precipitous drops gave the mountain a deserved reputation for danger. As tourism has boomed and the mountain's accessibility vastly improved with the installation of the cable car in the 1990s, visitor numbers surged. Despite the safety measures introduced by cutting deeper pathways and building up stone steps and wider paths, as well as adding railings, fatalities continued to occur. The local government has proceeded to open new tracks and created one-way routes on some more hair-raising parts, such that the mountain can be scaled without significant danger now, barring crowds and icy conditions. Some of the most precipitous tracks have actually been closed off. The former trail that led to the South Peak from the North Peak is on a cliff face, and it was known as being extremely dangerous; there is now a new and safer stone-built path to reach the South Peak temple, and on to the Peak itself.

Many Chinese still climb at nighttime, in order to reach the East Peak by dawn —though the mountain now has many hotels. This practice is a holdover from when it was considered safer to simply be unable to see the extreme danger of the tracks during the ascent, as well as to avoid meeting descending visitors at points where pathways have scarcely enough room for one visitor to pass through safely.

The year in books: 2013 edition

I'm going to just go ahead and ignore the fact that I haven't posted anything on this blog in 3 months (as well as the fact that I only have one reader left (Hi, Anon!)), and I'll launch right into my annual recap of the books I read over the past year. 2013 was a record year in book consumption for me, with 54 books read or listened to. Yes, you read that right: 54! (And I was all psyched when I reported reading 51 books in 2012. Pssh.) It seems that as I age I only get better, like a fine wine...except I don't really mellow out with age, I just read more and more and more, so maybe not like a fine wine at all. In any case, check this out--talk about (self-)improvement!*:

Sadly, aside from the raw numbers, 2013 wasn't a terrific year for me in terms of book selection. Would you believe I rated zero books 5 stars in 2013 (on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 is best)? Usually I have at least one 5-star book, if not more, but nope, not in 2013, when the top rating I gave any book was 4.5 (though there were two of those). Another six books got 4 stars from me in 2013. Contrast that with 2012, when I gave one book 5 stars, three books 4.5 stars, and twelve books 4 stars. I'm gonna have to make some better choices in 2014!

Key: Books I loved = 4.5; Books I liked a lot = 4; Books I liked OK = 3;
Books I didn't like very much = 2.5 or lower

Over half of the books I consumed last year were Kindle books (59%). Just seven (10%) were real, honest-to-goodness, paper books. That's kind of sad, because I really, really love physical books. But damn if it isn't way more convenient to read books on my Kindle--or to read Kindle books on my iPad or my phone. No need to plan ahead or to lug big heavy blocks of paper around in my already-too-heavy bag. With the magic of Kindle, I'm never without my current reading material! If someone is late or if I have to wait in line, out pops the phone, and bam, I'm edjumucating (or edifying) myself! (Note to self: you sound like a Kindle infomercial. Note to Kindle: I am available to host an infomercial.)

The Kindle has virtually ruined my dream of having a room in my future
house stocked full of books that I have read (pun intended).

Speaking of edjumucating (or not), I didn't do terribly well in 2013 in terms of reading non-fiction. A paltry five of the 51 books I consumed were non-fiction (that's 9%, versus 22% of the books I read in 2012). Interestingly, though, three of the books I liked best during 2013 were non-fiction. This seems to be a trend with me--I mostly read fiction, but my favorite books of the past few years have been non-fiction (cf. here and here). And yet, I don't regret for an instant reading all those made up stories (I only wish I had read more non-made-up stories). Hm. I'll have to think about what that says about me.

Man. And two of the non-fiction books were about food, too,
which I already kinda know about.

I read a lot of medium-length books in 2013 (average page count for Kindle and paper books: 331; median page count: 320).

Chart shows page counts for Kindle and real books only.
Page counts are based on the print copy (paperback if available
at time of calculation, hardcover if not).

Similarly, I listened to a lot of medium-length audiobooks. Average audio length: 14.1 hours; median length: 12.9 hours. My audio books ranged in listening time from 8.1 hours (blessedly short, thank goodness, I didn't like that one**) to 32.5 hours (thankfully, I did (mostly) like that one). Interestingly, in their paper form my audio books tended to be longer than my kindle/real books (average page count for audio books: 416, median: 384).

This data surprises me, because I usually try to pick audiobooks
that are as long as possible. Apparently I couldn't find many long
books I was interested in. Oh god, what if I've listened to them all?

Perhaps because I didn't consume very many super long books, I finished almost all of my books in a month or less--and I finished half of them in less than 10.5 days (average length of time reading or listening: 14.5 days; median: 10.5 days). Surprisingly, my audiobooks tended to be consumed faster than my reading books (average length of time to consume audio books: 13.2, real books: 15.1 days)

If you're wondering how this math works, know that I always have
two to three books going at once.

More fun book trivia...but no graphs. I'm tired of making graphs.

• Average rating for all of my 2013 books: 3.0. Average rating for audio books: 3.2, for non-audio books: 3.0. I apparently do a better job picking my listening books than I do my reading books.
• My favorite books of the year: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves; This Is Not Your City. Though I wouldn't necessarily recommend either of them to other people; they are both best suited for particular tastes--especially the latter, which is depressing as hell.
• My least favorite books of the year: The Angel's Game (I will never read another Zafón); Every Contact Leaves a Trace (that will teach me to accept a suggestion from Audible.com); Promise Not to Tell (not even worth the bargain price I paid for it years ago)
• Books I might recommend to others: Going Clear (holy smokes fascinating); The Curfew (weird and wonderful); Salt Sugar Fat (also fascinating, but more I-kinda-already-knew-that fascinating versus holy smokes fascinating)
• Number of short story collections read: 6 (average rating for short story collections: 3.5, versus 3.0 for everything else--I guess I do okay picking out short story collections as well).
• Months I finished the most books: April and May (6 in each)
• Month I finished the fewest books: August (2)
• Book that took the longest to read: The Idiot (124 days -- started in October 2012, finally finished in January, 2013)
• Book I read fastest: Thousand Cranes (1 cross-country airplane ride)
• Shortest book: The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (134 pages)
• Longest book (in pages and in audio time): The Goldfinch (784 pages; 32.5 hours).
• Number of dystopian*** novels consumed: 11. Number of dystopian-esque novels consumed: 3.
• Favorite dystopian novel: Love Minus Eighty (though it was only slightly above average)
• Favorite dystopian-esque novel: The Curfew (this one I liked a lot).
• Oddest books consumed: The Curfew and The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (tie for oddness, but I liked the former better than the latter)
• Number of books read for a book club: 2. Number of times I actually showed up at the book club: 1.
• Number of  books taking place in Spain that I read while on vacation in Spain: 2. Number of said books that I liked: 0. Chance that I will tailor my vacation book selection to the location of my next vacation: very low.
• Most common book length: 352 pages (n = 9. Nine! Wha???)
• Books I started in 2013 but which I am still reading: 2. 

And that's about it for my summary of the books I read last year. If you want to know more about my reading, you can (as always) visit my Goodreads page, and you can also peruse this Google spreadsheet I made, which includes my reading data from 2012 and 2013. Now: Bring on the books for 2014!

*Confession: if you look at the number of pages read each year, I seem to have peaked in 2011. But we won't talk about that; I'm not even sure how Goodreads calculates page counts.
**Which was really disappointing, because I read it after hearing about it on this awesome Radiolab Short and I had high hopes.
***Why does spell check want to turn "dystopia" into "utopia"? That's not at all what I'm trying to say!

We're all gonna die...of liver failure caused by acetaminophen overdose.

Last weekend, This American Life aired a special on acetaminophen, which turned out to be both informative and terrifying. I *highly* recommend listening to the episode.

If you're lazy, let me give you the message that I took home from it: The margin between a safe dosage of acetaminophen and a dosage that can cause liver failure is extremely slim, and it's unpredictable, i.e. different for every person. That means that even if you take just a leeeeetle bit more than recommended, or accidentally take the recommended dose of two products that contain acetaminophen, at the same time (Tylenol PM and NyQuil, let's say, to use an example that may or may not be drawn from personal experience), you could end up with liver failure. And/or death.

The link in the above paragraph is to a ProPublica article, which has a lot of the same information as the TAL podcast, but also additional info as well; ProPublica contributed a lot of the investigative reporting in the TAL piece. The article and its associated features are worth a perusal. But again, if you're lazy, ProPublica has come up with a list of five key takeaways that I'll cut and paste here:

1. About 150 Americans die a year by accidentally taking too much acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, federal data from the CDC shows.

2. Acetaminophen has a narrow safety margin: the dose that helps is close to the dose that can cause serious harm, according to the FDA.

3. The FDA has long been aware of studies showing the risks of acetaminophen. So has the maker of Tylenol, McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a division of Johnson & Johnson.

4. Over more than 30 years, the FDA has delayed or failed to adopt measures designed to reduce deaths and injuries from acetaminophen. The agency began a comprehensive review to set safety rules for acetaminophen in the 1970s, but still has not finished.

5. McNeil, the maker of Tylenol, has taken steps to protect consumers. But over more than three decades, the company has repeatedly opposed safety warnings, dosage restrictions and other measures meant to safeguard users of the drug.

A surprisingly large number of people have died from accidental acetaminophen overdose in the past decade (and even more have died of purposeful overdose, but that's a different beast altogether). By contrast, almost nobody has died of naproxen or ibuprofen overdose, though it is true that many naproxen and ibuprofen takers have had stomach bleeding as a result of their usage. Still, if I'm going to pick my poison, I'd rather have a stomach ulcer than a grave.

US deaths by accidental acetaminophen overdoseSource: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Multiple Cause of Death database

I don't take much Tylenol as it is, but I'm certainly going to be wary of my acetaminophen dosing from here on out!

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In completely unrelated news, I want to go to there.

HOW DO I GET ME SOME OF THIS

There's apparently some disease called "Auto-brewery syndrome." If you have this disease, you can brew beer in your belly and get yourself good and drunk...without drinking a drop of alcohol!

According to NPR:

A 61-year-old man — with a history of home-brewing — stumbled into a Texas emergency room complaining of dizziness. Nurses ran a Breathalyzer test. And sure enough, the man's blood alcohol concentration was a whopping 0.37 percent, or almost five times the legal limit for driving in Texas.

There was just one hitch: The man said that he hadn't touched a drop of alcohol that day.

"He would get drunk out of the blue — on a Sunday morning after being at church, or really, just anytime," says Barabara Cordell, the dean of nursing at Panola College in Carthage, Texas. "His wife was so dismayed about it that she even bought a Breathalyzer."

Other medical professionals chalked up the man's problem to "closet drinking." But Cordell and Dr. Justin McCarthy, a gastroenterologist in Lubbock, wanted to figure out what was really going on.

So the team searched the man's belongings for liquor and then isolated him in a hospital room for 24 hours. Throughout the day, he ate carbohydrate-rich foods, and the doctors periodically checked his blood for alcohol. At one point, it rose 0.12 percent.

Eventually, McCarthy and Cordell pinpointed the culprit: an overabundance of brewer's yeast in his gut.

That's right, folks. According to Cordell and McCarthy, the man's intestinal tract was acting like his own internal brewery.

The patient had an infection with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Cordell says. So when he ate or drank a bunch of starch — a bagel, pasta or even a soda — the yeast fermented the sugars into ethanol, and he would get drunk. Essentially, he was brewing beer in his own gut. Cordell and McCarthy reported the case of "auto-brewery syndrome" a few months ago in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine.

Kind of awesome, huh? Kind of horrifying, too, but still awesome.

If enough college freshmen get wind of this, we may have a Saccharomyces cerevisiae pandemic on our hands.

This is a test

Got the blogger app for my phone. Checking it out. Here's a picture.

(For the record, I didn't break that mirror. But I do wish I had had more time to take pictures of it before a lady came out of a nearby house and gave me a what's-that-hoodlum-doing look that sent me on my way.)

This mobile blogging thing seems pretty cool. Maybe I'll blog more if I can do it on the fly. Mayyyybe.

Daaaaaaaaaaang

I'm sure you've heard by now, but Yosemite/its environs is on fire.

Seriously, guys. It's on fire.

Are dolphins smart?

Not particularly.

They can't even actually communicate with any sophistication:

A disproportionate amount of dolphin research time has been devoted to teasing out any potential for language – the science-fictional myth of dolphinese – from their vocalizations. If dolphins had language, we would almost certainly have found it by now. When their vocalizations turned out to be rote and inflexible, “I’m scared!” “I’m mating!” “I see food!” pretty much covers it, the research turned to echolocation clicks. Perhaps dolphins were sending each other 3D holographic messages encoded in their clicks. Nope.

They do have signature whistles that identify the dolphin as an individual, but that’s the most referential thing about their communication system. In contrast, ground squirrels have an amazingly semantically-rich signaling system. Nothing about the dolphin whistle repertoire would prevent it from being used as a discrete combinatorial system to convey unlimited meaning, it’s just that dolphins don’t use it for that.

Also, they are jerks:

Adult male dolphins routinely kill porpoises, not for food — or even out of competition for food – but because the porpoise is similar in size to a dolphin calf. The killings serve as practice for their regular infanticidal behaviour, a sure way to ready mothers for mating.

Interesting review/summary of a book that's coming out in a few months.

Friday

Tomorrow's Saturday.

Yay, weekend?

Diversions

I'm tired and grumpy today, in need of diversions from a swirling morass of headache and morose thoughts.

That's why I'm glad Jessie forwarded me a link to this blog yesterday, which is awesome. I'm just sad that I didn't think of that idea first. "The bacon was hot, the kiwi was cold and the pasta was vinegary." I can't wait to read more.

Also there is this from McSweeny's:

I WANT TO MAKE LOVE TO YOU LIKE IN THE MOVIES.

I want to go at it under the sheets no matter how hot it is. Our feet will extend past the end of the bed, even though you get no leverage that way. We will not notice any unexpected moles or embarrassing tattoos. Everything that happens will be sexy. There won’t be any gross sounds or sights. Just like in the movies, our sex will be tasteless and odorless. I will not kiss your neck and get a mouthful of perfume and then you’re like what’s wrong and I’ll be like nothing and you’ll get all distant and I’ll be like sorry it’s the taste of your perfume, and you’ll be sad because you only wore it because I said I liked it one time and then all of a sudden you’re not in the mood and I think about sneaking off to the bathroom to furtively masturbate but I don’t and I just hold you limply until you fall asleep then I check Twitter for like an hour. That doesn’t happen.

I’ll lay out rose petals across the bed, and they won’t get in our butts, though it seems some of them logically would. I’ll rub an ice cube all over you, and you won’t burst out giggling, causing me to grow self-conscious and lose my erection. I’ll drip wax on you, which will be erotic and not at all like the other times you’ve burnt yourself on something hot, which have not been erotic at all. We’ll eat dessert off of each other’s nude bodies like that’s not the grossest thing two people could do to their sheets and skin. “Can’t we just have those strawberries later? I’m going to get all sticky,” is something you won’t say, in this paradise of physical pleasure.

And:

Great job! You’ve succeeded at nothing. But you voted. Here’s a sticker!

Is today over yet?

Gasp

Holy cannoli. Put these on the list of contraptions you will never, ever find me on.

60+-year-old aerial tramway in Chiatura, Georgia

The mining town of Chiatura, Georgia, surrounded by steep cliffs, is criss-crossed by a network of aging Soviet-era aerial tramways that are still in use today. In the early 20th century, after the U.S.S.R. annexed Georgia, Soviet authorities were intent on extracting the vast manganese deposits beneath Chiatura. In the 1950s, planners began work on what locals call the "Kanatnaya Doroga," or "rope road," that still connects almost every corner of the town. Today, while some of the cars have rusted away, 17 of the aging tramways remain in service.

...

The cabins run without a braking system; if the haulage cable snaps, the cabins will roll straight back down the track cable. This happened to a tramway in Georgia's capital Tbilisi in 1990, killing twenty people.

...

In 2008 the hauling rope of [a] tramway snapped with 12 passengers inside. Ramaz Khipshidze, the director of the Aerial Tramway Network says the automatic braking system worked "thanks to God." Chiatura didn't have the equipment needed to rescue the people inside. For 12 hours the passengers dangled above the town until a team from Tbilisi arrived with a rescue cabin.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

Man, blogging every day got real old, real fast. I guess I failed at my personal challenge of blogging every day for 30 days, but at least I learned a valuable lesson: blogging every day for 30 days isn't fun at all. It's kind of a stupid thing to try to do. (For me, anyway.)

But fear not, I'll give you some food for thought for today: The entire concept of tipping sucks.

Tipping is a repugnant custom. It’s bad for consumers and terrible for workers. It perpetuates racism. Tipping isn't even good for restaurants, because the legal morass surrounding gratuities results in scores of expensive lawsuits.

Plus, it's just plain annoying. I rather resent having to tip people as a standard matter of course. Why can't we just pay servers a living wage and eliminate this socially awkward custom once and for all? I am willing to absorb the cost in another way, and I bet at least some other people are too. Besides, getting rid of tipping might even make restaurant service--and food--better.

On a completely unrelated note, this made me laugh.

Snakes: Maybe creepier than fish

Oh holy lord. Decapitated snakes CAN STILL BITE.



As if I weren't skeeved out by snakes enough...

A floss a day keeps the cancer away, apparently

A kind of bacteria commonly found in the mouth, which is often the culprit in gum disease, also spurs the formation of tumors in colon cancer, researchers report today.

Apparently, the mouth bacteria "stimulates tumors" by "by blocking the expression of a gene that inhibits tumor growth." Well isn't that just terrific.

I bet one way to minimize the damage of my mouth bacteria is flossing. I hate flossing. But I guess I hate cancer more. Get ready to bleed, gums!

"They bite because they're hungry, and testicles sit nicely in their mouth"

Fish are creepy as hell.

Exhibit A: The Pacu, a piranha relative, which can grow up to 55 pounds and which has huge human-like teeth that love to crunch on small, round objects. Like...testicles.

The Pacu is making the rounds of the internet today because somebody in Sweden caught one in the Øresund Sound, prompting the Natural History Museum of Denmark to put out a warming to men to "Keep your swimwear on if you're bathing in the Sound these days." Which is hilarious, of course. I'd cover the story too, if I were a journalist.

To tell you more about the Pacu, which really does sound a bit frightening, I'd like to quote the delightful Henrik Carl, "fish expert" at the Danish museum:

[Pacus] are almost identical to the piranha, you couldn't even tell from the outside. It's just that they have different teeth. Flatter and stronger, perfect for crushing....The pacu is not normally dangerous to people but it has quite a serious bite, there have been incidents in other countries, such as Papua New Guinea where some men have had their testicles bitten off....They bite because they're hungry, and testicles sit nicely in their mouth...and its mouth is not so big, so of course it normally eats nuts, fruit, and small fish, but human testicles are just a natural target. It's not normal to get your testicles bitten off, of course, but it can happen, especially now in Sweden.

Then, helpfully, after terrifying everyone in both Sweden and Denmark, my buddy Henrik adds that the museum's warning was meant "as a bit of fun," and the discovery of the Pacu is really no big deal. Quoth he: "There's nothing to worry about... you're more likely to drown that get your nuts bitten off."

Alright. So, Pacus AND drowning. Lots to fear in Sweden!

Pacus have also been found in Illinois. So...cross that off the list of places I'll ever swim.

Cue the nighmares

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Hat tip to Anonymous for sending this article to me. I was feeling very blog-uninspired today, and Anonymous saved Posting Day 7 with this delightful story.

Sinkholes: Your new #1 fear

Well, I made it five days before I fell off the posting wagon. But even the Judeo-Christian God had a rest on Sunday.

(Yes, I guess I did just equate myself with the Judeo-Christian God. I'll let it stand.)

Speaking of acts of God, have you heard about the sinkholes in Florida? No? Well, they are terrifying. Especially if they open up underneath the resort villa you are staying in:



And they're even more terrifying if you're living in a house with your brother and a sinkhole opens beneath it in the middle of the night, and you hear your brother screaming for help but you can't help him in time and he gets sucked into the ground.

Florida is hereby crossed off the list of places I might potentially live. Not that it was really on the list (humidity, gators, hurricanes, swamps), but now it's definitely off.

So good.

"These guys aren't shucking around." Ha!

I heart public broadcasting. So much. This reminds me that I need to donate to my local station.

The internet is ruining the environment?

All my music, email, pictures, blog posts, etc. are stored in "the cloud" these days, and before I read the article below, I never really thought much about it. Turns out that "the cloud" is a giant blight on the environment.

Power, Pollution and the Internet

Most data centers [aka the physical homes of "the cloud"], by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner...Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid...To guard against a power failure, they further rely on banks of generators that emit diesel exhaust. The pollution from data centers has increasingly been cited by the authorities for violating clean air regulations, documents show. In Silicon Valley, many data centers appear on the state government’s Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory, a roster of the area’s top stationary diesel polluters. Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, [and]...data centers in the United States account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show.

Energy efficiency varies widely from company to company. But at the request of The Times, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company analyzed energy use by data centers and found that, on average, they were using only 6 percent to 12 percent of the electricity powering their servers to perform computations. The rest was essentially used to keep servers idling and ready in case of a surge in activity that could slow or crash their operations.

Even running electricity at full throttle has not been enough to satisfy the industry. In addition to generators, most large data centers contain banks of huge, spinning flywheels or thousands of lead-acid batteries — many of them similar to automobile batteries — to power the computers in case of a grid failure as brief as a few hundredths of a second, an interruption that could crash the servers. 

So like, the more I blog, the more we all die? That's...not good at all. Sorry about that, folks!

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Day 4: complete. It's Friday. Yay.

We're all gonna die...of formerly curable diseases

It will come as no surprise, that I have been, and remain, pretty concerned about is antibiotic-resistant diseases. Fueling my fear, it seems almost every week I trip across yet another story describing a virulent strain of some disease that no longer responds to antibiotics, or that has shown a drastic uptick in the number of antibiotic-resistant cases. Being a person who loves to share what she has, even if it's bad news, I thought I'd share two stories I've come across lately. Here goes.

1. E. Coli That Cause Urinary Tract Infections are Now Resistant to Antibiotics

In examining more than 12 million urine analyses from [2000 to 2010], [a set of researchers at George Washington University] found that cases caused by E. coli resistant to ciprofloxacin grew five-fold, from 3% to 17.1% of cases. And E. coli resistant to the drug trimethoprim-sulfame-thoxazole jumped from 17.9% to 24.2%. These are two of the most commonly prescribed antibiotics used to treat UTIs. When they are not effective, doctors must turn to more toxic drugs, and the more those drugs are used, the less effective they in turn become. When those drugs stop working, doctors will be left with a drastically reduced toolkit with which to fight infection.

People suffered from UTIs long before antibiotics were discovered in the early twentieth century, of course. Should these drugs cease to be effective, we’ll have to go back to what we were doing before. The truth is, though, before antibiotics we had no real treatment. ...[At some points in time], as a last-ditch effort, [doctors] operated to drain puss from the infected kidneys and hoped the patient would survive.  (Source; all emphasis mine.)

Untreated UTIs can lead to kidney infections, kidney failure, and blood poisoning. As someone who had a kidney infection five or six years ago (though not one caused by a UTI), I can assure you that such infections are really no fun at all, as they involve sustained periods of intense fevers (upwards of 106 degrees), and  may require you to take yourself to the hospital emergency room, where you will need intravenous antibiotics, which will make you woozy, so they'll give you something else for that, and then because of the anti-wooze medicine, they won't let you drive your car home, so if you parked in the wrong parking structure you will end up having a parking ticket when you come back for your car the next day. Like I said: No fun at all. So it certainly doesn't warm my heart that UTIs are becoming meaner.

Here's the full article about the antibiotic-resistant UTI E. Coli on PubMed.

2. Tuberculoses (TB) has been making headlines for a while because of the virulent multi-drug-resistant strains that are going around. Not only does there exist a whole wikipedia article about "Multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis," but there's also one for "Extensively drug resistant tuberculosis" AND one for "Totally drug-resistant tuberculosis," which just proves how big a deal drug-resistant TB is becoming. When NPR did a whole thing about TB last month, I was convinced right-quick that I should run far, far away from anybody who might have TB. Or who has a cough. Or who has been near anyone with a cough. Because if you happen catch one of the nasty TB strains, your treatment will involve 28 MONTHS of pills and shots (13,664 pills, 244 shots), which come with side effects such as "permanent hearing loss, permanent dizziness, kidney damage, psychosis, liver failure, nausea, rashes"--one or more of which 33 percent of patients allegedly suffer. And after all that, only about 50 percent of people recover! And don't rest high and mighty thinking this is a disease that only people in other countries get. Just last month NPR reported on an outbreak of multiple-drug-resistant TB in Wisconsin. So there.

Want to know more? You probably don't. But just in case you do, the WHO is keeping a close eye on the everybody's-gonna-die-from-TB situation and has a ton of info about it. Based on very cursory perusal, I've learned that if you want to avoid people with TB, you'll probably want to avoid all the countries in darker greens on the map below, which have the most people with drug-resistant TB (in terms of absolute numbers):

Click to go to a map with interactivity!

And you'll REALLY want to avoid Khazakstan, Belarus, Moldova, and South Africa, which have the highest incidence of multiple-drug resistant TB.

The above travel tip will end Day 3 of my 30 days of content. I've got to be off to drink margaritas and eat tacos. Ole!