It’s not easy to find a few days in which four twenty-somethings, a hard-working public health epidemiology nurse, and a college professor/aunt/sister living 1000 miles away can all get together for some beachy relaxation, meals and general watery merriment.
But, we all managed to make the time. My sister, her kids and selected others (friends, sweeties, etc.) have been gathering on the South Carolina coast since her kids were born. In fact, my sister and I enjoyed the same summer ritual with our family from the time we were born.
These vacations for me mean mellow family activity– swimming, walking, cycling (although the weather didn’t cooperate this trip), and occasionally kayaking. Also game playing, movie watching, and good meals, snacks, beverages and treats. Hanging out at the beach with people I love is my favorite thing of all, and I am the most relaxed and well-rested for the year.
So, what did we do this year? TLDR: swim (beach and pool), eat yummy coastal meals, stroll on beachs and by marshes, and sample soft serve ice cream, and play arcade games (yes, they still have skeeball and space invaders). Need proof? No problem.
Some of us on a partly cloudy beach day, not minding at all. My niece, in all her bathing suited awesomeness.
We listened to a Stevie-Nicks-Janis-Joplin homage singer at this marsh-front bar.
Me, nephew and niece at open-air bar, waiting on half-price mozzarella sticks.
We had dinner at a place called The Claw House, then strolled along the boardwalk. This party boat was coming back from a loud and possible queasiness-inducing voyage. You can see some people were very eager to disembark.
People fleeing, uh, disembarking from the Pie-Eyed Parrot party boat. The Pie-Eyed Parrot party boat at rest.
Honestly, I would have much preferred to have a party on this boat, which was also resting by the time we strolled by.
Inflatable flamingo party boat. This is more my speed.
These guys were playing 90s rock to a partly appreciative audience. I was among those appreciating it.
For those about to rock, we salute you.
One evening, we went to a local place for dinner, and enjoyed a beautiful sunset.
Purple and gray-blue and pink watercolor shades over the marsh. Similar colors against the porch of the restaurant.
And what family beach trip would be complete without some time at the arcade?
The Garden City pavilion and arcade. Fine family fun. We didn’t play this game, but did indulge in many silly engrossing tests of skill…
I’m still on vacation, so more fun will be had. But I had to share some of the ongoing fun with all of you.
Dear Readers, how are you spending your leisure time this summer? I’m always up for more frivolity suggestions.
There’s big news in sports this week: Serena Williams is officially back playing professional tennis. winning a straight-sets doubles match with her partner, Canadian Victoria Mboko, over the 3rd seeded pair in the Queen’s grass court tournament in London. Mboko was unfortunately injured during the tournament, having to withdraw from further play for the time being. Williams plans to play with a different partner in the Berlin open next week.
Not sports news, but nonetheless reported by the NY Times and other venues: Serena Williams has been taking Zepbound, a GLP-1/GIP weight-loss drug for weight loss.
Williams, 44, said that she made the decision after trying just about every other avenue. She had not wanted to take “the shortcut,” she said on Oprah Winfrey’s podcast last August, but, Williams said, getting to where she wanted to be after her two pregnancies was not working through training alone.
“I couldn’t beat the weight. It was the one opponent I couldn’t beat,” Williams, who manages her treatment through Ro, a telehealth company for which she serves as a paid ambassador, said.
And oh, do the commenters have comments! But first, some facts:
Serena is one of the greatest athletes of all time, having won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, two Serena slams, 367 match wins, and lots more here.
We FIFI bloggers love writing about Serena, including here and here and here and here.
Serena has had two babies and is 44 years old, which means that biology wants her to weigh more now. Biology is very persuasive with bodies.
Exercise, even intense athletic training (especially for women), doesn’t bring about weight loss. Studies have shown this, and you can read about them here, here and here.
Commentators, including both professionals and randos, never miss an opportunity to offer opinions on Serena’s body size, shape, age, clothing, work, parenting, you name it.
Serena is taking a GLP-1 drug– Zepbound, which is tirzepatide, for weight loss.
She is a paid ambassador to a telehealth company (Ro) that sells Zepbound, and her husband is an investor in the company.
Now, to the comments. But– humor me–one more little thing:
Why, oh why, do so many people have so many utterly unfounded, unsolicited and unwelcome opinions about Serena Williams? I mean, really. For example: In a 2019 poll, one in eight UK men said they thought they could take a point off her in a tennis match. This was after her 23rd Grand Slam win. I’d love to watch them try. If you doubt at all, check this out.
Okay, now to the NYT commenters’ comments. They include a wide range, of which some are below.
They minded that Serena’s doubles partner wasn’t mentioned enough.
They implied that by playing doubles, Serena wasn’t really back; after all, she only had to cover half the court.
They implied that taking a GLP-1 drug is like doping.
They said confused and false things (some wildly wrong) about the effects of GLP-1 drugs on muscle mass (fact: weight loss of any sort tends to reduce muscle mass)
They also said Serena was:
Self-prescribing (NO)
Offering medical advice (NO)
Doping in general (offering no evidence that she has and there is NO evidence that she has)
Doping because GLP-1s are performance-enhancing drugs (NONONONONO—I will be blogging more about this next week)
Then there were the science-splainers. This one was my favorite:
“it’s[GLP-1 effects] a consequence of how your body prioritizes what to break down for energy. This is governed by individual biology..”
NO. DEFINITELY NOT. SO NOT.
This one just made me mad:
I don’t understand the argument that she couldn’t beat her weight issues. I remember a time, way before GLPs when people lost weight the good old fashioned way I.e eating less, working out and staying active. When Serena, who during her prime years was one of the fittest and most athletic tennis players of all time, now says the only thing she couldn’t beat was her weight, this leaves me scratching my head.
DO YOU NOW? Because there was NO TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY in which many/most people lost weight the old-fashioned way and kept it off. Also, Serena is a woman who has had two children, one while still playing world-caliber professional tennis. And she is now 44. Which brings me back to the biology fact from the first fact list.
If you admire or love or respect Serena Williams even a fraction of the amount I do, you’ll now be on your guard against this newest pile of anti-science-and racist-misogynist nonsense. But I can’t leave you all riled up with nowhere to go.
I leave y’all with my favorite auto-correct comment:
what a terrible message to send to youth antlers.
Yes, let’s all be on our guard to protect those youth-antlers from GLP-1s in the wild.
Protect the antlers of our youth now from GLP-1s! Vamoose, I say!
Hey, remember way back a week or so ago when I posted about how some study came out saying that when we don’t engage in at least 10 hours a week of moderate-to-vigorous activity, THIS IS NOT ENOUGH?!
All the things they said, including: THIS IS NOT ENOUGH.
But guess what? There are new studies out saying, well, different things, which makes them not like the other studies I reported on.
One of these things is not like the others…
Turns out (according to this week’s science), any amount and kind of movement is good for just about whatever ails ya.
Yeah, I know. You knew this already. But still, it’s good that more science says so.
Yes, you likely know this, but it helps to have data on your side. Here’s a blurb from this Outside magazine article about a recent study on longevity and physical activity:
The study zeroed in on 3,600 subjects between the ages of 50 and 80, and tracked them to see who died in the years following their baseline measurements. In addition to physical activity, the subjects were assessed for 14 of the best-known traditional risk factors for mortality: basic demographic information (age, gender, body mass index, race or ethnicity, educational level), lifestyle habits (alcohol consumption, smoking), preexisting medical conditions (diabetes, heart disease, congestive heart failure, stroke, cancer, mobility problems), and self-reported overall health.
The best predictors for how to live longer? Physical activity, followed by age, mobility problems, self-assessed health, diabetes, and smoking. Take a moment to let that sink in: how much and how vigorously you move are more important than how old you are as a predictor of the years you’ve got left.
Note that body weight/BMI are not on the list of good predictors of longevity. Again, maybe you already knew this, but it bears repeating.
In more new and unsurprising but happy science, a big cross-cultural study offers evidence that even light and momentary physical activity can help us feel lighter in mood and also more energetic. Here’s what they said:
Investigators discovered that even light, non-structured physical movements, such as household chores, climbing stairs, or short walks, trigger immediate elevations in happiness and energy. Strikingly, the data unmasked a continuous virtuous cycle: individuals experience a sharp mood boost shortly after increasing their physical movement, and conversely, experiencing an elevated mood naturally primes individuals to become physically active shortly thereafter.
The idea here is super-cool: physical activity and improved mood/increased energy create a virtuous cycle. Each reinforces the other. See the technical graph below that I MADE ALL BY MYSELF, WITH NO GEN AI to explain.
A virtuous cycle in much physical activity reinforces mood and energy, which reinforce patterns of physical activity, and so on and so forth. You’re welcome.
The study gathered data from 8000 international participants, and has cross-cultural applicability. You can find more detail and an interview with one of the main researchers here. I love this main takeaway from researcher Yue Liao:
You don’t need a gym session to feel better. An increase above your own usual activity level will bring mood-enhancing benefits, especially by helping you feel more energetic.
I love me some physical therapy. it has helped me come back from orthopedic surgery, injury, accident, wear and tear and repetitive motion-induced pains.
One of the things I love the most about PT (physio in Canada) is how much I learn about my body through interacting with my physical therapist, adjusting and changing exercises over time. We always talk about what’s become easier, what is still difficult, how different body parts and functions are changing over time, and how that affects my health and fitness goals and practices.
Last year, I spent 5 months in PT for sciatica that had gotten to the point where climbing stairs was painful, hip pain woke me up at night, and even walking right after driving hurt. Yes, I know, driving is the one of the worst things for our musculoskeletal systems. Whatcha gonna do…
By the end of that rehab period, I felt so much stronger and happier and functional and knowledgeable about my vulnerabilities, needs and resources. Yay! Thanks Julian and Louis!
Here’s the thing: PT/physio seems like exactly the kind of healthcare that needs to be in person, with two bodies present: patient and physical therapist. Recovery trajectories aren’t linear. They involve dips and surges, all of which require on-the-spot adjustments to exercise regimens.
So you wouldn’t think that anyone would even consider outsourcing PT/physio to something like AN APP.
But guess what? They have. Yes, I’m aware of the We’ve-got-an-app-for-that approach to healthcare, but I just got a most unwelcome update when my state employee healthcare overseers, MassGIC, started hawking a new app (this one is called Hinge Health), with the promise of ease, flexibility and no copays. They also included this on their website:
From their webpage: transforming how MSK pain is treated. and delivered. I don’t think that’s what they meant to say. But hey, I’m a fussy humanities professor…
To be sure, not all apps for all uses for all healthcare are ill-concieved. In a 2024 qualitative study of use of exercise apps for people managing osteoarthritis at home, both patients and therapists report convenience of the app over paper copies of exercises, increased accountability through digital reminders and ease of recording at-home exercise sessions. However, patients also reported problems with the quality of the apps, technical problems and security concerns about their personal data. Therapists reported concerns over compensation for interacting with patients over apps (that is, they frequently weren’t reimbursed for time spent with them) and overall a preference for paper exercises over app use.
For this company, I did a little sleuthing, and found that 37% of reviewers on TrustPilot, an independent reviewer site, gave it one star (i.e. bad bad bad). They cited aggressive marketing practices and also billing the patients when the service was explicitly covered by their insurance. Recall that having no copays was the primary appeal for patients. Sigh.
Technology continues to transform the way healthcare is delivered. I know this. And there are lots of advantages: increased access for those in less-resourced areas, ease and flexibility of access to information, tracking and accountability, and sometimes even cost.
One one size does not fit all. Some of us want and need in-person interactions with qualified health professionals for our care.
Also, when technology is poorly handled, those qualified professionals are either forced to do less or uncompensated work (e.g. emails, app chats, etc) or entirely supplanted by unqualified workers who must rely on canned materials to try to answer the complex questions of patients.
Which gets us to a bigger problem: trust.
I want healthcare that I can trust. And in order to trust it, I need to trust the healthcare providers. And in order to trust them, I personally need to see them in person, at least most of the time. Which sometimes can include telehealth, and sometimes may include email or patient portal messaging, and sometimes maybe even an app. But I need to know that my healthcare providers will provide me the access I need. Arguing with my phone is not how I want to spend my recovery.
I know, phone, it’s not you, it’s them… Thanks Konstantin S from Unsplash.
It is a well-known fact among everyone who’s ever met me knows that I’m not a morning person. I approach the morning with reluctance, suspicion and movement aversion. Coffee is my morning cardio.
So imagine my reaction to this article from Outside magazine proposing the activity of (I can barely bring myself to type this, much less contemplate doing it) jumping 50 times in the morning. For health.
Oh no indeed. Thanks Heather W from Unsplash.
The folks from Outside do cite studies from actual respectable sports fitness journals promoting the benefits of what they can “jump training”, which, while unpleasant-sounding to me, is quite preferable to “jumping 50 times first thing in the morning”.
Jumping a lot in rapid succession apparently:
increases bone density
builds muscle
promotes lymphatic drainage
improves circulation
wakes you up (like that’s a health benefit– hmphf)
Okay, I get that “science” says morning jumping is a good idea. However, I propose some alternative morning regimens that carry their own benefits. Here’s a preliminary list that I worked up, but feel free to add your own ideas. And, as always, sharing is caring.
10. Wonder what day it is.
9. Hit the snooze button. Repeat.
8. Try to make sense of the snatches of dream that are still in your awareness.
7. Listen to the morning sounds of your house and neighborhood.
6. See how long you can stay in bed while pretending you don’t have to pee.
5. Ponder what you might like for breakfast, eventually.
4. Listen to a morning meditation, sort of trying to meditate, but not really.
3. Snuggle in bed with a pet, a loved one, or (in my case) one of several Squishmallows.
2. Accept a cup of coffee brought to you by someone who knows how to make coffee the way you like it.
1. Roll over and go back to sleep, for god’s sake!
These are the days when I’m glad to know some really good epidemiologists. The planet is warming, global travel is surging, and bad buggies are on the move. No, not these kinds of buggies:
Dune, beach and horse and buggy. None of them infectious, as far as I know.
Nope. I’m taking about these buggies:
Lyme bacteria, the current Ebola virus, and the Andes hanta virus– colorful but dangerous.
I thought I might post some updates from the aforementioned really-good-epi folks, as it’s sometimes overwhelming to try to keep up with global health news and hard to know which sources to trust. I’m not a doctor (not the medical kind, anyway), but my posted updates are from sources *I* trust– international news outlets, the WHO (World Health Organization), and YLE (Your Local Epidemiologist) substack (which pulls its info from the most reliable technical sources).
According to the European CDC, as of 26 May there are a total of 13 cases (11 confirmed) of hantavirus. One new case has been confirmed since the last update. There are no new deaths. All quarantined persons in North America are still negative. There’s a long (45 day) incubation period, but we’re at the median period now. This means if you weren’t on that ship, you are almost certainly in the clear. Color me not worried.
My apologies if I’ve used the pineapple with sun glasses and party hat recently, but it personifies non-worry to me right now.
Second: There’s an Ebola outbreak in The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda. According to YLE, there are more than 1000 cases so far in DRC, which experts believe is an undercount. Why? For wonky epidemiological reasons:
positive test rate is 50%
At most 20% of contacts are being traced right now
They’ve only been really testing for a week, and it’s a lot-a-lot of cases for one week
Cases are spread out over 16 different health zones, so containment is harder
You might be wondering, what are the Centers for Disease Control and the US government doing to help contain this outbreak and support and treat those who are affected by Ebola (which has an average case fatality rate of 50%)?
During the 2013–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the US and Canadian governments played major roles in sending public health teams, supplies, health workers, setting up treatment centers, and providing support, along with the WHO and dozens of other countries. More than 11,000 people died of Ebola, with another 17,000 surviving it.
In 2026, the situation is quite different. Canada is providing more than $8M in international assistance funding though a bunch of governmental and non-governmental organizations. This is in addition to its annual $150–200M in foreign aid. See here for latest details.
The US government, after cutting foreign aid to the DRC by 75% (affecting its public health and other necessary infrastructures), is releasing $80M to various organizations overseen by the UN and various NGOs (non-governmental organizations).
However, the big emphasis by the Trump administration is that no American contracting Ebola (including those health workers its sending to Africa) will be returned to the US for treatment (in one of the several world-class health centers with top-level bio-containment.) Instead, according to the New York Times,
The Trump administration plans to send to Kenya U.S. citizens exposed to the Ebola virus rather than bring them home for observation and treatment, according to three people with knowledge of the plans.
The approach is a stark contrast to the way previous administrations responded to outbreaks, during which health care workers and other U.S. citizens exposed to the virus were brought home to be treated at specialized medical units. The administration this month flew an American doctor who developed symptoms to a hospital in Germany, and transported six other Americans for monitoring in Germany and the Czech Republic.
According to the substack by Dr. Craig Spencer (the physician who got Ebola in 2014 while working for MSF/Medicins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders and WAS transported to the US for treatment, and recovered):
The government is training a few dozen Public Health Service officers — uniformed members of the U.S. commissioned corps — to deploy to Kenya to staff it. These are people we send under orders, often to crises, disasters, and outbreaks. And under this plan, if one of them is exposed, or falls ill, the government apparently does not intend to bring them home either.
So, to sum up: for this Ebola outbreak, the risk to the North American public is very very low. But, the risk to global health overall is substantial. Also, the risk to American and other health workers, deployed military doing humanitarian work, and UN personnel os higher than it needs to be because the US is refusing to take care of them in our own world-class medical facilities.
So, am I worried about me or others in North American getting Ebola? No. Am I worried about the damage my country’s leaders are doing to global healthcare capacity, the mission of international health workers, and citizens of all countries affected by this outbreak? YES. You bet I am.
Third and finally, there are the ticks. It turns out that tick numbers are declining in the Northeast and Midwest at this point in 2026. YLE annoted this very nice CDC graph to show where we are:
The blue-green line is tick-related ED visits this year, and we are about at peak for the year, and it’s lower this year. I mean, that’s something.
However, tick-borne diseases are in general on the upswing, so we all need to be careful. Here are more YLE tips:
Keepenjoying the outdoors! But if you’re in a tick-prone area, take that extra minute to do a tick check. The most important thing is removing the tick properly (use fine-tipped tweezers, grab close to the skin, pull upward, no twisting, no Vaseline, no matches). Then watch for symptoms: fever, rash, fatigue, joint aches. If you find an attached tick and are in a high-risk area for Lyme disease, it’s worth calling your doctor if it was attached for more than 36 hours.
So, am I worried about ticks? Always. I live in tick heaven here in New England. But this means I am careful to wear proper repellents (DEET for skin and Permethrin for clothing for me; you do you here), and I also check carefully after being outside. Will this keep me from going outside? Certainly not. And I hope it won’t slow down your outdoorsy summer, either.
Conventional advice from convention health sources says that at least 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise per week is important to maintain health. The CDC (the good-old-fashioned one, based on real health studies) says so here.
And it turns out almost half of adults in the US get that amount. Which is better than previous studies showed.
But wait– there’s new research out there telling us in no uncertain terms that we were wrong.
Yeah, stick figure and I are equally flummoxed by this news.
I know. I mean, we’ve written so many blog posts about how small intervals of physical activity, whether in short bursts or in longer increments, are a huge boost to health and well-being.
But all those things I said, all the things we said… this is not enough.
The researchers analyzed data from 17,088 participants in the UK Biobank, a large biomedical dataset and research resource, between 2013 and 2015. Study participants, with an average age of 57, wore an activity tracker on their wrist for seven consecutive days to record their normal activity levels.
During a follow-up of the participants after nearly eight years, 1,233 cardiovascular events (heart attack and stroke) were recorded. People, regardless of fitness level, who got 150 minutes of exercise each week had a nine percent reduction in cardiovascular event risk.
But to achieve substantial protection from cardiovascular events—defined as more than a 30 percent reduction in risk—the participants needed to log between 560 and 610 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise a week. This works out to about nine to ten hours of weekly exercise. Just 12 percent of people in the study hit those numbers.
Right. So, if we don’t measure up, are we just doomed? One of the researchers hastily responds no, every type and amount of movement counts.
[Senior researcher on the study] Ziheng Ning also says it’s important to avoid looking at exercise as a pass/fail threshold. “Instead, think of it as a continuum: more movement generally produces greater protection, and fitness level matters,” he says.
What are we to make of this? There have already been a bunch of criticisms and responses to the published study. Among the objections are these:
the study collected data for only one week for participants, potentially not accounting for variation in exercise patterns
the participant group was largely white and able-bodied, so not applicable to the general population
this was an observational study, so no causation could be concluded
But the bigger objections were from health and fitness professionals who argued that the notion of “optimun” is relative to a baseline, and these vary for a lot of reasons and at different times in one’s life. Also, other studies show modest but significant health benefits for all sorts of physical activities, in all sorts of amounts and durations.
For my money, I don’t think activity or fitness is a continuum, where we slide forwards and backwards. Instead, I think we dip in and out, try on something for size, take a new sport out for a spin, chill out, loll about, dance around, and feel the occasional spring in our step. It’s about finding a cadence that works with the playlist our lives are running at the moment.
What’s your cadence this week/this month/this year/this decade/this life? I’d love to hear what you’re up to.
As I write this post on Sunday May 24, it’s 53F/11.5 C and raining in New England. This is not the May weather I grew up with, having been born and raised in South Carolina. However, after several decades of calling the Boston area home, I know that late spring doesn’t let go of its fickle grip on northern regions without some pushback. However, it does eventually become summer, and with summer comes… yes, sweating.
We at Fit is a Feminist Issue have written about sweating. Here are a few posts to check out:
Basically, Samantha is accepting of sweating, Mia is a sort of a sweat advocate, and I sweat a lot and complain about it. Until now.
A local mental health clinic in my area put up this public service list of things that are good about sweaing. I took this in, and am working on being more sweat-positive this summer.
Sweat positivity list– memorize this before the weather really turns hot and humid.
Okay, I can see that sweat is another occasion for appreciating my body. And it signals that I’ve done something (mostly; although I can sweat copiously while not moving an inch). Yes, sweat is a sensational experience (in one sense of the word). And it keeps me cool without having to start panting all the time.
Fine, sweating is good for us. Happy now?
I will be once I find myself in proper sweating weather. Which I hope will be this week. Will post a perspiration update (or not) later…
I’ve been following the hantavirus outbreak with great interest and a little trepidation. Great interest because my day job– public health ethicist– means I want to see how this is being handled to think, write and teach about it; a little trepidation because, well, it’s an an outbreak of a scary virus on a large moving vessel (the MV Honius) driving around the ocean with 175 people aboard. Yeah.
There is overall good news coming out of reliable sources (e.g. the World Health Organization websites, public health substacks like Your Local Epidemiologist, which I read and trust). That news is that the case count as of May 13 was 11 cases and 3 deaths. The passengers have all disembarked, and their countries have made arrangements for their sequestration and/or surveillance during the roughly 6-week incubation period.
But I think we need to know what’s working well and what’s not in public health these days. After COVID, we learned a lot. But some lessons we still keep having to go back to, again and again.
Bad news/good news one: The bad news is that a hantavirus outbreak on a ship was not on anyone’s radar. Yale epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina said on this podcast on her substack that this scenario was not on her top-100 list of Bad Things to Happen on a Cruise Ship.
The good news is that as soon as hantavirus was confirmed in one of the sick passengers, the WHO swung into action, coordinating reporting to health authorities, sharing knowledge, helping arrange safe dockage for the ship, and contact tracing for the 34 passengers who had disembarked after the virus came aboard.
Bad news/good news two: Where was the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) in all this? Well, pretty much in the dark because
Trump fired or forced out many/most of the senior scientists who have leadership experience in infectious disease;
Trump pulled out of the WHO, so the CDC isn’t officially in the loop on their activities (the Your Local Epidemiologist folks said that US public health people were getting info from WHO friends as a favor to them);
current leadership of the CDC isn’t even requiring the American passengers from the cruise ship to quarantine at home during the 42-day incubation period. According to this article, “the CDC is currently taking a “conservative approach” that involves “encouraging” people to stay home during the monitoring period.”
But but… what about the good news? Here it is: state and local public health authorities are on the scene, and they are monitoring the passengers, communicating regularly with the communities where the affected passengers are staying, and being completely transparent about the processes they are using the manage the crisis. This happens every day, all day, for all manner of infectious diseases, including flu, pertussis, measles hepatitis, all over the world. Local public health folks deserve a yearly parade. And yes, my sister of one of those folks– she’s a public health epidemiology nurse, working hard in an understaffed agency (also thanks to Trump and RFK). If it weren’t a major privacy violation, I’d ask you all to send her a thank-you card…
Bad news/good news three: Cruise ships and viruses– man, this just keeps happening! Yes, it’s true that cruise ships seem to be floating petri dishes for nasty bugs like norovirus. E coli outbreaks happen, too. But, in this case, the MV Honius folks did everything they could to minimize health and environmental impact of their travel (other than being an energy-intensive mode of transportation): they had sanitation protocols designed to keep contaminating biomatter from leaving or entering the ship, especially as their destinations are often fragile ecosystems. It was just a very unfortunate happenstance that the only form of hantavirus with human-to-human contact showed up from two passengers who likely contracted it in Argentina. The ship authorities responded promptly and fully, cooperating with the WHO and affected countries.
Bad news/good news four: there is no treatment for hantavirus (other than supportive care), and it has a case fatality rate of 25–40%. Oh, and this variant– the Andes version– is the only known one with human-to-human contact. Okay, let’s make sure to breathe here. The good news is Andes virus outbreaks have happened before and been stopped through old-fashioned public health means of isolation and contact tracing. Also, this virus isn’t highly contagious– it’s much less contagious than COVID.
Bad news/good news five: with the CDC in a leadership and knowledge vacuum and political leadship refusing to back up or fund public health infrastructure, it’s harder than ever to get accurate and relevant and trustworthy information. Yes, that’s true. But the good news is that there are both official sites (like the WHO, international news outlets) and substacks are out there and on the job (like Your Local Epidemiologist and dozens of others by conscientious experts who care about the public’s physical health and emotional well-being when crises happen). I posted this clear and reassuring flow chart on FB that the YLE folks made. It reassured me, and I hope it will reassure you.
Flow chart assessing anyone’s risk from the hantavirus. Upshot: if you weren’t on the boat or spending a lot of time with someone who was, you’re likely totally fine.
As always, your trusty FIFI bloggers will keep you apprised of whatever comes our way. Now, go out and enjoy the lovely May day…
Finally, finals are over, and I’m doing a bushel of grading. The bulk of it is logic exams, which we now give on paper because otherwise, students would cheat using GenAI tools.
Argh. Sigh.
Speaking of logic, though, I’m reminded of one of my favorite cognitive biases: the Dunning-Kruger effect. This cognitive bias happens when we wildly overestimate our own knowledge or competence when we ourselves have very limited knowledge or abilities in some area.
I’ve used this graph when I teach this bias in class. What it lacks in technical jargon it makes up for in humor and clarity.
This graph whimsically shows beginners climbing the peak of Mount Stupid.
My favorite example of this is a result from 2019, where a poll showed that 1 in 8 British men (12%) believed that they could take a point off Serena Williams in play. By contrast, only 3% of British women polled held this belief. What explains the difference?
This article from 2025 on overconfidence in beginner sports players offers a few insights. The bad combo of overconfidence and low self-awareness alongside low competence that some beginners have results in low performance (and sometimes injuries or accidents).
But what about so-called “beginner’s mind”? Isn’t being a beginner supposed to free us from expectations and limitations? This article explains:
It’s dropping our expectations and preconceived ideas about something, and seeing things with an open mind, fresh eyes, just like a beginner. If you’ve ever learned something new, you can remember what that’s like: you’re probably confused, because you don’t know how to do whatever you’re learning, but you’re also looking at everything as if it’s brand new, perhaps with curiosity and wonder. That’s beginner’s mind.
In yoga classes, I try to maintain beginner’s mind (to go along with my beginner’s ability), even though I’ve been practicing for years. It’s just more fun for me, taking it one pose at a time, exploring what it’s like (including the difficulties and physical limitations of my own musculature and range of flexibility) to do some pose or other.
Except for hero pose. I cannot now, nor have I ever been able to do that one. Go ahead, judge me.
This post came about not just because I’m trying to distract myself from grading, by the way. I saw this YouGov poll in which Americans were asked if they thought they could beat Donald Trump in a fistfight. Turns out that more Democratic women respondents believe they could beat Trump in a fight than Republican men respondents. Here’s the data:
71% of Democrat women think they could beat Trump in a fight, compared to 46% of Republican men and 19% of Republican women.
So my question I leave you with, dear readers is: Is this Dunning-Kruger effect, some form of beginner’s mindset, or are lots of women fed up with Trump and locked and loaded for a one-on-one showdown? You make the call…
