THE WORSE VIRUS

THE VIRUS THAT KILLED 300 MILLIONS PEOPLE

Today in May 2021, the coronavirus Covid-19 has infected 169 million and killed 3.5 million people worldwide.  The whole world is living in fear.  Lots of people are placing their hopes on the vaccine and right now most people are waiting for their turn to be vaccinated so that they can go about their normal lives.

Now, let's take a look at another virus that is much worse than Covid-19.  It's the smallpox virus in the 20^th century, around the mid-1900s.  It is believed that the smallpox virus was first discovered about 3,000 years ago and originated in India or Egypt with the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses V dying from it in 1145 BC.

Smallpox is estimated to have caused 300 to 500 million deaths in the 20^th century!  It started 3,000 years ago and was declared eradicated with the use of vaccine.  WHO declared the world to be free from naturally occuring smallpox in the year 1980, after a massive worldwide vaccination campaign started in 1977.

The death rate is about 30%, that is, 3 out of 10 people infected will die from it.  You can check it out on Google or Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox

In Chinese, smallpox is known as 天花病.  We can see some cases mentioned in the martial arts movies of olden days.  Older folks would have read about smallpox and Dr Edward Jenner in their history or science books during their primary school days.

This is how smallpox looks like…

 

And this is cowpox...

WHO DISCOVERED THE VACCINE FOR SMALLPOX?

There is no cure or treatment for smallpox till today.  But not to worry - the disease has been eradicated.  How?  With the use of vaccines.  All of us have been given smallpox vaccine when we were just one-year olds.  And probably some booster shots later.

Dr Edward Jenner first noticed that some of the milkmaids did not get infected with smallpox and he wanted to know why.  He found out that they had earlier contracted cowpox which he thought was somewhat similar to smallpox.  As a result, these milkmaids had immunity and did not get smallpox.  He then carried out his famous experiment by inoculating a boy with pus from a cowpox blister.  The experiment was successful and the boy became immune to smallpox. It was the year 1796.

This is how cowpox looks like...

   

This picture is before and after recovery

HOW RISKY IS VACCINE?

How about the risks of smallpox vaccine?  The smallpox vaccine will give roughly the same reactions or side effects of our current Covid-19 vaccines.  Did anyone die from smallpox vaccine?  Yes, like most vaccines there is a possibility of serious side effects or even death.  There have been deaths from taking smallpox vaccine but the risk is very low at only one or two deaths per million.

Some people get confused and anxious about taking the Covid-19 vaccine.  Unlike the olden days, today news travels fast, far and wide.  Someone having serious adverse effects from vaccine will be on the news in no time and a lot of people will get scared.  There are many countries such as the Philippines and even Hong Kong that reject vaccines due to these fears.

Eventually most people come to the conclusion that it is better to get vaccinated, just like smallpox.  One of the reasons is that lots of people get infected everyday, and lots of people die from it.  The chances of dying from Covid-19 is very much higher (2 in 100) than the chances of dying from vaccine (2 in 1,000,000).

We hope that soon Covid-19 will be eradicated through vaccines just like smallpox.

If you have not been vaccinated against Covid-19 yet, it is advisable to do so as soon as possible.  Protect yourself and your loved ones.

Source:-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_smallpox#:~:text=During%20the%2020th%20century%2C%20it,in%20the%20world%20each%20year.

 https://www.healthline.com/health/smallpox#treatment

 https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/vaccines/Smallpox-Vaccine.html

 https://www.who.int/vaccine_safety/committee/topics/smallpox/questions/en/

 

How our mind operates

After listening to numerous talks on lifestyles, motivations, health and soul, there’s one particular common interesting topic; that is our mind.

From one particular talk by a yoga guru, she summarized in very well,

• 1.    The logical/scientific ways
• 2.    The non-scientific ways or our belief system
• 3.    Imaginative or worrisome
• 4.    Subconsciously
• 5.    Our memory

These 5 parts are governing us socially, professionally and individually, it intertwined in our mind and provoke us to make decisions. Let’s look at one thing at a time and elaborate it further.

In a progressing and technological world like ours, there are thousands or millions of researches on various topics, products, theories and activities. These are results driven scientific data to proof a theory, action, or product. As we select to read or understand the sections that we are interested in, these facts became our logical data in our mind and it became a reference point for our judgement, decision and choice.

We all learned through experiences, education, feedback, media and sharing, as we go through with lives. These components will determined how we behaves and who we are, and these components are constantly triggering our choices and options, most noticeable are advertisements and a bombardment of information, be it a truth or a myth.

Let us look at a typical scenario, a normal person indulged in outdoor activities like running and hiking. There are numerous researches on these activities, that it help to reduced cardiovascular diseases and give other health benefits to our bodies, and with proven scientific data, that when these exercises are done properly and diligently, it will brings a lot of health benefits. Then, there are myths and hyped up stories that someone have died from running a marathon or suffered a stroke during hiking. The media created a great sensation with these stories, the headline will read “Man died of Cardiac arrest while running THE ABC Marathon”, but it may not be true that this person who died from stroke is caused by running the marathon. Then when this person’s belief system sets in and choose to belief the stories by the media, he became worrisome, and start to imagine the possibility of a stroke whenever he is doing his runs or hikes. These worries started to build to up in his subconscious mind coupled with the memories of these stories playing in his head, he started to make his decision based on all these built-ups.

Conclusion, what will be his choice?

Social Lock down

Social Lock down

The year is 2020, in the beginning of the year, anticipations of a fabulous year ahead was so positive. But then as news broke out that there is a possible Global Pandemic in January, most of us does not pay much attention to it. As most human beings have this, it will not happen to me attitude. As the virus called Covid-19, started to spread at an alarming rate globally, world’s leaders called for a major lockdown or a Restricted Movement Control (RMC) starting in March 2020. In Malaysia, our RMC started from 18^th March, expected to last till 28^th April.

What does this means? Everyone will need to stay at home, no social gatherings, dinning out are not permitted, non-essential businesses are ordered to close, schools closed and only limited movement within a certain radius are allowed to buy necessities. Violators were slapped with hefty fines, roadblocks and closure of certain roads were enforced.

With all these happenings, many thoughts arises:-

·         How to cope with daily life during this period

·         What businesses will draw the last breath or thrive

·         What is our social responsibilities

·         What will happen after this crisis

Let’s dive into coping with the daily life during this period, various people will have their own challenges, I am going to isolate it to my own frame work.

I am already in my late fifties, I switched career 7 years ago from a contractor and re-educated myself to become a Personal Trainer in health and fitness and an event manager as well. This complete changed of lifestyle and activities, landed me with an entirely different group of friends and clienteles, which needs to be socially and physically active in a positive manner.  

With this lockdown order, all activities stopped and everyone were so reliant on technology like, group chat, group meeting, virtual classes and social media. These open up a whole new outlook of how people going to carry out with their activities, especially the elderly or senior age group.

Despite having all these technological help, the social interaction is still a very crucial part of our life. As we trek along with the virtual meeting, I observed that most participants were quite reluctant to voice out and action are unable to communicate properly. This brings about a non-impactful meeting/training, but as the saying goes, something is better than nothing.

 And on the home front, there are a lot of adjustments needed to make,

• Stocking up on groceries, we in Kuala Lumpur are so fortunate, we have supermarkets within our doorsteps. In the past we just buy stuffs whenever it is running low, and does not have the habit of stocking up
• Eating out was the norm, now we are having home cooked meals every day, from these we can comprehend the plights of full time housewives, where they need to cook and plan for the meals every day.
• Putting up with your family members 24/7 can be challenging, as we are not use to spend so much time confine in the house, and as time goes along everyone just became quiet, and glued to the TV, mobiles and computer. As I hypothesized, some couples may ended up in divorce or grew deeper in love or just speechless.
• Catching up on back logs, finish the books that you always wanted to read, updated homework, tidying the house and updating the blogs.
• Missing your friends and social gatherings, outdoor activities, outdoor exercises and sports.

On the other hand, we learned

• ·         Groceries planning, do not buy unnecessary and food rationing
• ·         Be thrifty, careful on the spending, as some may lost some incomes during this period
• ·         Have empathy with your family members, non-demanding
• ·         Learn to live in isolation or limited mobility
• ·         Ways to fill your time
• ·         Learning up new knowledge

Let us pray that this pandemic be over soon, and once we come out of this event, our outlook of life will be different. Viruses do not discriminate, whether you are rich, poor, powerful, different races or powerless. These are invisible enemies where the whole world is fighting on different grounds. But then on the positive note, the earth have a chance to rest during this pandemic, pollution reducing, rivers run clearer and the forest is getting a rest.

There are still a lot of uncertainties after this event, why stress oneself on these uncertainties, just take it as it comes along.

I am BACK!!!

Hi folks, its been 13 years since I last visited my blog, where else my partner Andrew is much hard working than myself. He's been contributing to my blog recently, and because of the Stay At Home order, it is time to do some housekeeping.....stay close and new thoughts will surface.

TO QUARANTINE OR NOT TO QUARANTINE

It's a difficult decision to make for the leader of any country.  Right now, Indonesia's leader is facing this very difficult decision.

https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/04/06/avoiding-quarantine-will-inflict-greater-economic-harm-survey.html

Quarantine means stopping almost all economic activities and that will bring great losses and hardship for the citizens.  On the other hand, the continuous spread of disease is most likely to bring even greater losses.

What happened to the Spanish flu?  How did it end?

Leaders of countries may be hoping for a similar end to the current coronavirus.  The Spanish flu which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide or about 3% of the population at that time, started in January 1818 and ended three years later in December 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#End_of_the_pandemic

However, by the end of 1918, cases had dropped sharply to almost zero.  The leaders of every country are now hoping for that to happen to the current coronavirus, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#End_of_the_pandemic

IT'S DANGEROUS TO DISTURB YOUR NEIGHBOURS DURING LOCKDOWN

Some people are on the verge of mental breakdown due to depression caused by lockdowns.  Don't disturb them.  They may shoot die you.

https://www.nst.com.my/world/world/2020/04/581538/man-under-lockdown-shoots-five-people-death-talking-loudly

US FINALLY DECIDES TO WEAR MASKS

China forced everyone to wear mask to fight against the coronavirus.  But strangely, the Americans and the Europeans (under the advice of WHO which is controlled by the Americans) said that masks were not important.  Only sick people should wear them, not healthy people.

But it doesn't make sense to the layman, right?  Why practice social distancing when masks are not important?

Some people speculate that the reason is simply because America does not have enough masks for everyone.  It is a democratic, human-rights type of country where democracy doesn't really work for emergency situations like pandemic.  There, everyone has guns, and if the President tells them that masks are important the consequences would be really serious.  More people may die from gunshots than from the coronavirus.

Now, after many weeks, they probably manufactured enough masks for everyone.  The President and WHO today says masks are important to prevent the spreading of the virus.

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/3078437/mask-or-not-mask-who-makes-u-turn-while-us