Thursday, June 11, 2009

Interesting tidbit about bacterial infections...

My mother has always told me that the flu seemed to be worse when she was growing up in California (now, she lives in Montana.) I can vouch for the effectiveness of the little flu germs down here. They seem to be a lot more potent; a few years ago, a flu kept me bedridden for over five days. That was horrible. Today, I saw a little anecdote while reading a Science Blog article about having sex in the summer:

"A study released last fall by Oregon State University found that summer is a bad time for bacterial infections in general, with serious infections caused by bacteria up as much as 17 percent with every 10-degree increase in seasonal air temperature."

I'm willing to bet that a similar statistic applies to geographical temperatures, as well.

Incidentally, the rest of the article seemed like common-sense stuff and wasn't particularly noteworthy; e.g., steeping in the hot tub bad for fertility, E. coli lives in water and is bad, etc, etc.

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