Viruses/Body And Brain Flashcards
Viruses — BR The Body
COVID will be with us forever, just like the flu. The Herpes virus has endured for hundreds of millions of years!
Ocean viruses alone, laid end to end, would stretch for 10 Million light years. If one end started on Earth it would stretch into space past the next 60 Galaxies!
You are not a person but a world! Looked at genetically, you are 99% bacteria and 1% you.
Just one passionate kiss transfers a billion bacteria from one mouth to the other.
Viruses cause 1/3 of all deaths on the planet.
To your brain, the world is a stream of electrical pulses, like Morse code. Out of these impulses it creates you and the universe as YOU understand it.
Your brain is you. Everything else is just plumbing and scaffolding.
You can suffer Cardiac Arrest without having a heart attack. (Find out how?)
Fatty liver disease is lethal, and mostly associated with OBESITY.
Your spleen sits high on the left side of your chest.
“Life is an endless chemical reaction.”
Overweight is defined as BMI 25 to 30. Over 30 is obese.
You must walk 35 miles or jog for seven hours to lose just one pound.
By the late 1950’s people smoked 4,000 cigarettes/year.
I smoked two packs a day for 11 years. That is 124,000 smokes.
You blink 14,000 times a day. This equates to eyes being closed for 23 minutes each day.
The overwhelmingly majority of your ancestors were not even human.
Ref: 10% Human book
90% of our body functions are powered by bacteria! We only control 10%.
A water flea has 50% more genes than we do.
Multiple cell organisms evolved 1.2 billion years ago.
Just as our planet’s ecosystems are populated by different species of plants and animals, so the habitats of the human body host different communities of microbes.
Stool, far from being the remains of our food, is mostly bacteria, some dead, some alive. Around 75 per cent of the wet weight of faeces is bacteria; plant fibre makes up about 17 per cent.
Our microbes make our vitamins!
1900, the average life expectancy across the whole planet was just thirty-one years. Living in a developed country improved the outlook, but only to just shy of fifty years. For most of our evolutionary history, we humans have managed to live to only twenty or thirty years old, though the average life expectancy would have been much lower. In one single century, and in no small part because of developments in one single decade – the antibiotic revolution of the 1940s – our average time on Earth was doubled.
we have, as a species, gone a long way towards conquering our oldest and greatest enemy: the pathogen. Pathogens – disease-causing microbes – thrive in the unsanitary conditions created by humans living en masse. The more of us we cram onto our planet, the easier it becomes for pathogens to make a living.
In 1900, when up to three in ten children died before the age of five, average life expectancy was dramatically lower.
Women suffered most as a result of the proliferation of hospitals, as the risks of labour and giving birth, rather than falling, actually rose. By the 1840s, up to 32 per cent of women giving birth in hospital would subsequently die.
in 1918, as many as 100 million people died from the flu pandemic that swept the globe after the First World War.
obesity is not always a lifestyle disease caused by overeating and being under-active. Rather, it is a dysfunction of the body’s energy-storage system.
Stopped p. 76.
