Not another health scare!

Some people are so paranoid!  A cousin of mine was staying with my family about ten years ago.  He knocked on my bedroom door late at night and asked 'What's the symptoms of meningitis?'  He had a minor cold (or just a slight headache) but the popular illness to be frightened of was meningococcal meningitis.  I told him to ask a doctor (why he thought I was one I have no idea).  In the early to mid nineties you could empty a bus in ten seconds by getting on and saying 'I've got meningitis.'  Only about a hundred people died from it each year, but the newspapers loved the disease and ran a story on the front page whenever this happened.

I'm a blood donor, or at least I was until a few years ago.  I gave blood eleven times in the UK and twice in Poland until the health form changed.  The Polish medical questionnaire asks 'Have you spent more than six months in Britain between nineteen eighty and nineteen ninety?'  If you answer 'yes', you cannot donate blood.  Why?  Well the Polish authorities think that you might have a  disease called CJD, which might come from BSE.  BSE is the famous 'mad cow disease' which was such a big problem with British beef for so long.  Never mind the fact that nobody has proved that the human brain disease comes from the one in cows (in other words, there's no direct evidence that eating infected beef gives you CJD).  What matters is that there is a paranoia in the country so the blood banks have to be unusually careful.

The last big health scare in the UK was foot-and-mouth disease.  This infects farm animals and is harmless to humans.  The solution?  Go around the farms with a large supply of shotguns and some petrol.  I'll leave you to work out what they did with them.  Now there's another one called H5N1 bird flu.  It has just been found in the country's leading turkey farm.  It could have been worse.  Two months ago it would have created havoc with the Christmas shopping (turkey is the central dish in a British Christmas dinner).  The point is, it hasn't killed anyone and we are talking about just one farm here.  Nevertheless, this hasn't stopped the newspapers from talking about it as if the battle of Armageddon had just started. 

The thing I found funniest is when bird flu came to Poland.  The authorities discovered it in the city of Toruń.  The first thing they did was close most of the roads into the city.  Because that's how birds get into cities, isn't it?

Glossary

minor                          drobny

a questionnaire            ankieta

to donate                    ofiarować

havoc                          spustoszenie

M M E C K C G T D E G N S Z X

P W U T O K Y R I F M E L W P

S C F I Y R A U P U H L V L R

Q Y D X R Z D I Z T T I U V T

N K L W A O O O O R L P H C Y

A V B H K W T R N J F K J O D

F X O R Y P P A F O D C B A V

J I H O U J D Z M Z J O N W H

B Y O Q Q J H Q E E D T B K U

I M P O R T B A N T R S B A O

N O I T A N I C C A V C Z A T

V X G F F T Y K Z Q S E P E Z

V X W A U F P Q C F B C M E C

E Q T M C A N X X M O R E N H

E T N H E A K V O H H B F K V

Clues:

1. This is what you inject into someone so that they won't get an illness.
2. When the hospitals think they will need a lot of 1), they do this to get ready for it.
3. If you need to destroy an animal and it's to harmful to bury it, you put it here.
4. When you see people head-to-foot in white protective suits, they are probably handling this sort of material.
5. The police set up one of these to stop members of the public going into a protected area.
6. Other countries set up one of these to stop a country selling them infected food.

KEY

1. vaccination
2. stockpile
3. crematorium
4. biohazard
5. cordon
6. import ban

Did you know?

A chocolate company had a health scare this week.  They had to bring back (recall) several Easter eggs and other products for safety reasons.  There was nothing wrong with the chocolate, but they didn't have the right labels on them.  The right ones say 'Warning: This product may contain nuts.'