Have You Ever Wondered?

I realise of course, that one fine day in the not too distant future, in a corner of California, there will eventually be a clinic that specialises in oral-care for canines. Heck, it probably exists already, knowing the all too-rich I-have-everything-in-the-world-that-I-need consumer culture that is rampant in the U.S (or so I imagine). In fact, dog psychologists are almost becoming the norm nowdays, as is designer-fashion accesories for the ‘hip’ pooches.

For the rest of us in the real world however, we never send our lovely mutts to the dentist. After all, they don’t seem to need it. But why is this? How come dogs don’t need dentists? Dogs never brush their teeth, let alone get the recommended amount of ‘brush after every meal’. Dogs don’t gargle. They don’t use floss (not the dental kind anyway). They don’t watch their diets. They eat bones. Hell they’ll eat almost anything. Yet, I don’t see them having trouble with plaque. I don’t see them needing braces. They don’t need to get those fillings done, simply because, they teeth hardly rot at all. And finally, our little doggie friends never ever seem to get trouble with those damn impacted wisdom teeth that commonly affects humans.

It doesn’t seem fair now, does it?

We take so much effort and pay so much money to take care of our teeth on a daily basis, yet, in the end we still have to pay some dude with rough hands to inflict pain by drilling holes into our gums, and hammering teeth which are still connected to our jawbone.

Is it all a gimmick then? Is there a world dental association that collaborates secretly with the toothbrush and toothpaste industries to try and manipulate all of us into thinking that we need all these products and services, when in fact we don’t? Are there groups of people in lab coats meeting in underground stone buildings and masonic halls in medieval europe conspiring against all of humanity, preying on our ignorance and our fears, in the hope that we continually fund them by buying their products and services? And do these people form leagues with the tea and tobacco industries - the latter two developing products that are designed to yellow our teeth, which the oral-care industry rigoruously develops products to whiten our teeth.

Definitely something to think about the next time you want to purchase dental floss.

Do me a favour. Try to blank your mind, and keep calm. Take a deep breath in. Now, think of a homeless person. A homeless person wearing layers and layers of clothes, usually in a mixture of browns and greys. A homeless person with a shopping cart full of plastic bags and hidden treasures. Imagine this homeless person walking down the street in the late evening. In your mind, is this person a male, or a female?

I bet you were imagining a male. But why?

Is it because you read my title, and therefore I have manage to plant a perconceived notion, subtlely, into your mind?

If so, then, it proves how easily the human mind can be manipulated. It shows how easy it is to plant an idea into someone’s head. Especially if you use a tool called ‘doubt’. Hey, don’t miss this penalty Beckscum. Those posts are looking a little lower than usual, you may want to keep it low. Oh, and there seems to be a bit of a breeze from left to right, you may want to aim further to the left then. *Beckscum kicks the penalty and blazes it to the far left and above the post*. Hey, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

But, if I didn’t manage to manipulate your mind, or, if you hadn’t read the title in the first place, and yet you still answered ‘male’, then, it is fair for us to ask, why does it seem most homeless people are male? After all, it should be the other way around, since males have a much lower life expectancy than females.

Is it because males are loved less? Is it because males take more, and larger, risks in life? Is it because society protects women more than men? Or are there simply more males in society than females? Or, are there approximately equal number of homeless people in each gender, only that we tend to see more homeless males, simple because the homeless females are at ‘home’ somewhere cooking dinner?

Hmm. Life changing questions indeed.

I just caught the cold the other day. Yes. Poor me. I took two days off - two fairly bad days as I had to endure watching Oprah Winfrey and all that day time crap that’s on TV. I wonder how many points my IQ has dropped within those couple of days?

But before I get into my whingeing mode, let me put forward this question -shouldn’t the common cold be extinct by now? But first, let me give you the whole situation.

The common cold, or also popularly known as the ‘flu’ (which is a misnomer) or ‘the sniffles’, is caused by viruses. In fact, around 200+ viruses are known to cause the common cold. Let’s just call it 200, just to make things easy.

These viruses enter our body, they multiply, our body responds, we get sick (or rather we feel the symptoms of the cold), and a combination of our deadly white blood cells and the superior defence of our new antibodies get rid of the virus. Usually within a week. Nothing new there - we all know this.

Furthermore, we also know that once we have an antibody for a particular virus, that virus cannot infect us anymore. That’s why we can only get chicken pox once in our lives.

The average human catches the cold approximately 1-3 times per year (some quote 2-4 times per year). Some people get it more often, some less. Children are particularly susceptible, with statistics as high as 6-8 contractions per year.

Also, mother’s breast milk is supposed to transfer some of the mother’s antibodies to her baby.

Do you see where I am heading?

If we take an average human that lives to say 80 years old. An average human that, in her (let’s call it a she) childhood years (say up to 12 years old), contracts cold fairly regularly, at say 4 times per year. Then, for the rest of her life, she contracts the cold at an adult average of say, 2 times per year. This would mean by the time she’s 25 years she would have contracted the cold… (where’s my calculator?).. umm… 74 times. That’s nearly a third of all common cold viruses. By this time, logic would have it that she is far less likely to contract a cold, in fact, around 1/3 less likely.

Suppose our dear friend who’s regularly sick has a child, and she passes half of her antibodies to her child. This child would now be immune for over 15% of all common cold viruses. If this child grew up and caught the cold regularly, and her body built antibodies which she passed on to her daughter, eventually we should all be immune from the common cold, yes?

Even if we couldn’t pass our antibodies from mother to child, by the age of 40 an average human should be immune to about 50% of all common cold viruses. If we think about this as a population, where each human would be immune to 50% of common cold viruses, but each human would be immune to different combinations of common cold viruses, then surely the viruses would have an impossible job of spreading? If this is the case, if viruses cannot find new targets or vectors for transmission, surely they would die out quickly? This is, after all, how we eradicated Smallpox in the 60s and 70s.

The answer, of course, is that these viruses evolve. Yes, evolve. Evolve into better and more powerful beings. For most of us, this concept is not hard to imagine, but for a small minority of religous people, this may be hard to stomach. People who live in the central United States for example. People who believe that the world was created with a snap of the fingers and a flick of the wrist of God. People who believe that this Creationist theory should be taught in science classes.

It is of course, ironic that a monologue on the common cold is turning into a one sided rant on the application of the Creationist theory into science classes. Ironic because both spread like diseases, and it seems, both cannot be completely eradicated.

But I shall hold my tongue here for once. If I got into trouble for slandering chopstick users, imagine if I started to attack religion. So, to end with something in-topic, I shall pose you, the reader, a question :

If viruses mutate, why can’t we catch chicken pox more than once?