ahaagsma's blog

I started my medical practice on the North Shore of Vancouver in the summer of 1956 as a general practitioner—at that time truly a family physician, with house calls, office visits, and hospital care of kids, parents, and grandparents. I still had a lot of free time in the first year as my practice grew and was hired by public health people to vaccinate North and West Vancouver schoolkids in the context of the then-regular vaccination programs against smallpox, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and, later, polio.

Recent research into the cause of prematurely graying hair strands is offering a faint hope for two promising outcomes: reversal of unwelcome sudden graying and possible access to our biological history hidden compressed in minute hair segments—not unlike the rings in a tree trunk holding information about the life of a tree. 

Researchers have found evidence that stress may indeed be a cause of early graying, and that in some cases a reversal of graying can occur with a decrease in stress. 

An article in a recent issue of the Journal of Women’s Health highlights how sex and gender play an important role in the current pandemic. Using the approach of the US National Academy of Sciences, sex is defined in the article as based on one’s genes, and gender as an individual’s self-representation as male or female, based on social interactions. For example, sex-based physiological differences may account for the innately stronger postvaccination immune responses in women. Clinical trials may need to asses sex-specific dosing guidelines.

World Zoonoses Day, on 6 July, is a day to call attention to infectious diseases that can spread between people and animals. On this day in 1885, Louis Pasteur administered the first rabies vaccine to a human bite victim, a young boy bitten by a rabid dog. The vaccine worked; it prevented the boy from getting rabies and saved his life. 

Given our current hand-washing responsibilities related to the COVID-19 situation, I was looking for some background material to write a blog post about the history of hygiene and the impact of the pandemic on our ablution habits. I was sidetracked in my search for bathing habits over the ages by pictures of bathing scenes dating back to ancient Greek times. Most subjects were women shown nude. As the relevant Wikipedia article pointed out to me, the artists’ interest was less about the bathing itself and more to provide a context for showing the nude figures.