Why You Should Wash Before Eating
I worked for a number of years with a woman who suffered from an ulcer. She seemed a happy and carefree person, if sometimes given to bouts of great stress over her job, and we all tried hard to help out so as to relieve her and keep her stomach calm. Sometime towards the end of my tenure with that firm, I’d heard that ulcers weren’t stress-induced, and I’ve since had occasion to wonder if J. had ever followed up on the news, which she’d initially dismissed, as the rest of the medical profession did for years, apparently, that the root of her trouble was bacteriological. Perhaps now that Dr. Barry Marshall and Dr. Robin Warren have won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of H. pylori, she’ll have done a course of tetracycline and have done with her troubles at last. (N.b.: Australia often pulls in the scientific Nobels, especially medicine, so along with socialized medicine – assuming it lasts – M. and I are in the right place for our old age, aren’t we?)