Watching the World
“Immunized Against Death”
● “After nine years of dying,” says Manaf Mansour, director general of Lebanon’s Information Ministry, “we’ve been immunized against death.” Explaining the slight public reaction to civilian casualties during recent fighting and car-bomb explosions in Lebanon, he continued: “All of this, over these many years, is like a morphine shot dulling our senses against death. It is very tragic, but we have it.”
Since the start of Lebanon’s civil war in 1975, an estimated 60,000 persons have been killed, 40,000 wounded and 300,000 made homeless. Civilians are said to make up over 80 percent of the dead and wounded. “There has been so much death,” says The New York Times article, “that many people have abandoned the traditional 40-day period of mourning followed by Christians and Moslems.” Abandoned also is the custom of making several visits to bereaved families to pray with them. With so many dying, it would leave little time for work. It is feared that the children, so accustomed to violence and killing, will not find violence unacceptable when they grow up.
Lotteries Can Harm
● “Many Canadians spend money on lotteries that would more properly be spent on running their homes,” observes the Toronto Star. “The most intense ticket buyers tend to be the people who can least afford to spare the money.” As the article points out, there are hundreds of thousands of losers for every winner. Many players, hoping to hit the jackpot, keep getting more deeply involved or become addicted. In order to support her $5,000 a week habit, a 34-year-old bank teller stole $183,000 from her till before she was caught. Even her $80,000 winnings were used to purchase more lottery tickets, reports the Star. Said the judge when sentencing her: “I think lotteries can develop an emotional instability, a dream or hope, which is almost impossible of achievement.”
False Hypertension
● Separate studies in Italy and the United States have shown that worrying about your health while in the doctor’s office, or merely knowing that the doctor at your hospital bedside is about to take your blood pressure, is enough to elevate your blood pressure and heart rate. Many are thus diagnosed as suffering from hypertension and may be taking medicine and treatment unnecessarily. As reported in New Scientist, one patient’s systolic blood pressure measurement “rose by 75 mm Hg [mercury] even though the patient knew in advance what was going to be done.” The researchers conclude that the last of three or four measurements made over a period of 10 minutes is likely to be accurate, despite the initially disturbing presence of the doctor.
Twenty Million Jobs Needed
● “Twenty million new jobs will be needed in the industrialised world,” reports The Guardian, “simply to stop unemployment from rising over the next five years.” Based on a report by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), it states that the labor force is likely to grow by that amount by 1989, and the jobs will be needed just to prevent the present unemployment level of 35 million from getting worse. In 1984 the number of persons out of work for over a year is expected to account for 45 percent of the total unemployment in France, 40 percent in the United Kingdom and about 10 percent in Sweden and in the United States.
Book Thefts Increasing
● “Valuable books and documents have been disappearing from American libraries at a faster and faster rate in recent years,” reports The New York Times. Among the hundreds of items reported as stolen are a book by Copernicus, 16th-century astronomer, valued at $150,000, and a draft of the script for the film “Star Wars.” One estimate is that losses will easily reach $50 million a year in the United States alone. Says Lawrence Towner, president of Chicago’s Newberry Library: “What was once only an endemic disease has in 20 years become a virulent epidemic.”
Evening Best Time to Exercise?
● “Evening is . . . the best time to exercise if you’re trying to lose weight,” reports Industry Week. “Vigorous exercise before dinner can depress your appetite for a couple of hours. It also speeds up metabolism, which ordinarily slows later in the day, thus helping the body burn more calories.” Running may also be best done in the evening, states the article, referring to a study showing that morning joggers sustained more injuries than afternoon runners. The reason? Muscle tissue is well stretched later in the day, and more body fluid cushions the feet.
China’s Bicycles
● China has more bicycles than any other country—over 150 million. They are the principal mode of transportation, as only a select few own an automobile. And, as it is with cars in other countries, certain brands of bicycles are more prestigious and sought after. “It is not merely snobbery,” says The New York Times, “for there is a gap in quality between the top models and the other bicycles made in China.” Nearly half the 24 million bicycles produced last year were considered substandard by the government. This has led to widespread counterfeiting and mislabeling of bicycles that are built from damaged or rejected parts. “The legitimate factories did not complain,” says the Times, “because they were paid more for the junked parts than the pittance they usually got from recycling companies.”
New Rat Killers
● Ever since populations of “super rats,” resistant to the poisons used, appeared, scientists have been looking for new ways to kill rats. Now they have come up with bromethalin, a drug that causes paralysis and death by slowing the transmission of nerve impulses. Tests have shown the poison to be over 90 percent effective, even on resistant species, after just a single feeding. The scientists are optimistic that the rats will not learn to avoid it, as they have with other poisons, since they don’t die until two or three days after ingestion. Chinese scientists, on the other hand, have produced an “electric cat”—a device that activates an electric charge whenever a rat brushes against its tiny wires. A 98-percent kill rate is claimed.
Making Matters Worse
● Dating services for persons who have contracted herpes have sprung up in a number of large cities, but these may actually be detrimental, doctors say. “The popular notion that ‘once you’ve got it, further exposure doesn’t make any difference,’ promoted by the dating services, is not medically valid,” two doctors wrote in a letter to JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association).
Longevity Despite Surgery
● Women in the United States live, on the average, seven years longer than men. “But,” says Parade magazine, “for every 10 patients who undergo surgery, at least six are women. Moreover, of the 10 most frequently performed surgical procedures in the U.S., five are solely for women.”
Sick “Game”
● Some describe it as “sick, twisted, fascist, perverted and puerile,” says Toronto’s Globe and Mail of a game that has been attracting thousands of adults in Canada and the United States by the “allure of combat without gore.” Called The Survival Game, it has the players divided into two teams, each having its own camp about one kilometer apart. The object: Capture the flag of the opposing team, and without being “killed,” bring it back to home camp. The “killing” is done with guns that look like the real thing but that use carbon dioxide to fire paint pellets of different hues that burst on impact. According to Canadian promoter Gerald Campbell, one firm even requires that its salesmen play the game, as it considers the “marketplace to be a war zone.” While people interviewed “paid lip service to concerns that there was something demented about a person over 25 running about the woods pretending to shoot people,” reports The Globe and Mail, “they all talked of learning to wait” and “watch the look of surprise contort the enemy’s face when you squeezed the trigger and the bullet exploded on his chest.”
‘Sedentary Children’
● “Children who aren’t encouraged to run and jump and swing soon lose confidence in themselves and in their ability to use their bodies,” says Dr. John Saunders, coauthor of a survey undertaken at the University of Queensland, Australia. “Kids these days tend to be driven to school, teachers tell them to sit down, be quiet and listen, and when they get home they are told by their parents again to sit down and be quiet in front of the television.” The result is that many young children are turning into “sedentary little people” who are losing the ability to play properly.
Power of Print
● In spite of all that is said about TV and video, evidence shows that most people still depend on print for news and information. According to the Wilson Quarterly, fewer than one third of adults in the United States watch TV news on a given day, but 68 percent read at least part of one newspaper, and 12 percent read two or more papers each day. About 30 percent of the adults read one of the newsweeklies. Calling TV news “just another show,” communications professor Lawrence Lichty says that Americans will “continue to rely primarily on print for decades to come.”
The World’s Gold
● About 89,000 tons of gold have been mined throughout history, reports Compressed Air Magazine. Official institutions and monetary authorities hold 42 percent; 30 percent is in the form of jewelry and 11 percent in coins and bullion held by private parties.
Reuniting Koreans
● Millions of persons have been separated from their relatives in Korea since the war broke out there in 1950. South Korean television is now helping to reunite them by televising either the persons looking or placards identifying them. As a result, some 2,000 families have already been reunited, and hundreds of real-life, touching dramas with happy endings have been televised. At first scheduled as a one-shot program, it drew such heavy response from tens of thousands asking for help in locating missing relatives that it became a regular feature. Previous efforts through newspapers and police registries usually fell short, as millions of North Korean refugees changed their names when settling in South Korea, or they were too young when separated from their relatives to remember the family names. Compounding the problem was the fact that so many Korean names sound alike.