HEALTH & WELLBEING
March 27, 2020
Written by: Emmanuel G Escobar
A few days into the global outbreak and it seemed like most people didn’t get the memo. Supermarket supplies were still ample and we were all shopping as we normally would. There was no panic buying in stores, anywhere that we could see or that was being reported on the news. A few days later, the realisation that the virus could spread and be labelled as a pandemic saw shoppers rushing to buy anything they could, or you would think so.
HEALTH & WELLBEING
March 26, 2020
Written by: Emmanuel G Escobar
It feels that this lockdown will last weeks, if not months. And staying at home for many of us will be difficult to deal with in these challenging times. But some of us might be living under different conditions, which for them staying at home isn’t so bad. After all, it’s about balance of one’s life and activities, which can still be accomplished despite the social distancing measures.
Tags: Mental Health
HEALTH & WELLBEING
March 26, 2020
Written by: Emmanuel G Escobar
It is almost difficult to accept how one’s life can change overnight, more so when it’s the lives of a quarter of the entire world population. Many of us will either be entering into a period of self-isolation, or quarantine or have already been through the first couple of weeks. It is important however, that we slow the spread of the virus, ideally by placing restrictions on the way we essentially function as a population. But this mustn’t come as a surprise. Viruses will take advantage of tightly packed cities from which the disease can travel from host-to-host (more like coast-to-coast).
Tags: Isolation, Mental Health
HEALTH & WELLBEING
March 8, 2019
Written by: Emmanuel G Escobar
Most of our human body is covered in microbes—sorry germophobes. In fact, several of these microbes are good for us, and play very important roles in our organism. You might frequently hear that we have good gut bacteria that keep our intestines healthy, but did you know that Staphylococcus aureus are part of our body’s microbiota? This little guy is however most commonly associated with MRSA, which corresponds to specific strains of S. aureus that are resistant to antibiotics. This is something that we can expect in a world with five million trillion trillion bacteria (even Microsoft Word cannot handle this number and suggests to delete the repeated word).
Think about it: the air that we breathe, the surfaces that we touch or the water that we drink, all have these microscopic travellers. On a normal day, this is something that we might don’t think about. If someone coughs in their hand and then reaches out to greet you, then you might be more receptive to how germs travel from host to host. But what about those everyday things that we do that might be harnessing the health risks of everyday microbes?
