Boogie-woogie flu
We know quite an amount about the coronavirus outbreak that began in China, writes Maurice Gueret, whose only prediction is for a decline in cruise holidays and air travel
Wuhan Woes
I haven’t written about the coronavirus outbreak yet.
Print deadlines mean the written word can be overtaken by events. Yes, I am worried. Moderately worried. Not as worried as a pessimistic pal, who suggested to me over dinner that three-quarters of the world population may have it by Christmas. Past experience with Sars and Mers outbreaks showed that these had a relatively short lifespan. This new disease from Wuhan, Covid-19, is more contagious than its 18-year-old and eight-year-old viral cousins. Experts are still learning on the job about this one. One was asked by a journalist how things will pan out. He said he’d answer that only when it’s over. Predictions of final outcomes could be as wild as long-range weather forecasts. Certainties are few. You can harbour the bug and not have symptoms. One in every 50 people who come down with the illness may perish. Beyond that, we watch, wait and wash our hands. Cruise shipping and air travel could be major casualties. If I was a cruise doctor, I’d be asking for an open-air hammock on the top deck.
Boogie-woogie
Elton John hasn’t been well on his marathon farewell tour. His voice went missing in
New Zealand, and a case of atypical walking pneumonia was diagnosed. This is a trendy new diagnosis. Pneumonia can strike fear into the heart of patients.
For doctors, it’s an infection where pus fills up air sacs in the lungs, and fever, cough and breathing difficulty results. Chest X-rays will help confirm the diagnosis. Severe cases were often referred to as ‘the old man’s friend’ in medical literature. The implication being that pneumonia wasn’t a bad disease to carry an already very sick person to Paradise. News of Elton’s dose seems to imply that his case is mild, mild enough to walk about and not be confined to bed. He did have to cancel concerts, perhaps while waiting for antibiotics to kick in. Insurers worry about cancelled gigs. They demand higher tour premiums from well-seasoned performers. BP Fallon had the perfect remedy on his old radio show. He’d play, I got the Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu.
Flower piles
I’m always delighted to hear of old family cures at info@imd.ie. I was writing about haemorrhoid remedies recently, and a lady who grew up in the midlands told me about her mother’s cure. She had inherited the recipe from her own stepmother many years before. The reader recalls a steady stream of people calling to the house asking for the “famous pile ointment”. In their innocence, she and her brother would ask what piles were, but the children were never told that particular secret! She remembers being sent out, as kids, with buckets to a little stream across from their house in Co Laois. Along its banks grew plants with yellow flowers, and they would gather them, roots and all. Their mother would boil them in a pan, drain them and let her mix set in a small ointment bottles. The smell around the house wasn’t very pleasant. The recipe wasn’t passed down after her mother died. I am no botanist, but one candidate that may fit the description is figwort, which thrives in damp spots, doesn’t smell so good and has been used in folk medicine for generations. Another yellow-flowered plant is the lesser celandine, a member of the buttercup family, which is also known as pilewort, with good reason. It has been used to make haemorrhoid salves and suppositories since medieval times.
Out in Cappagh
Cappagh is in the news. Re-branders have been in with a large saw. What was Cappagh National Orthopaedic Hospital will henceforth be known as the National Orthopaedic Hospital Cappagh. Patients, with their repository of good sense, will still laud it as plain old Cappagh. Just as former Tory Minister Jonathan Aitken did on a recent episode of music show Private Passions on
BBC radio. The onetime MP, who guested in Her Majesty’s prison service for perjury, is now happily reformed as an Anglican priest. He was born in Dublin and spent three years of his childhood in Cappagh with tuberculosis. He described in glowing terms the nuns who ran the place in the late 1940s, and instilled great culture into their young patients. On Christmas mornings, tenor John McCormack would come in to sing to staff and patients on the wards. Aitken also remembers Sir John Betjeman, then working for the British embassy in Dublin, coming in to recite some of his poetry. Happier days, indeed.