Who Would Have Thought ----------

   

I would have never thought that I would see what is going on in the world with Corona Virus. It never entered my wildest thought at any time in my life.
     My parents would be horrified to see what is going on, if they were still alive. My grandparents managed to not get the Spanish Flu in 1918. Maybe because they lived on small farms in very rural communities. I have been reading about different pandemics.
    Smallpox has killed more people than any other disease. Thank goodness we have a vaccine for it now, as we do for polio, measles, mumps, and the flu as well as many other diseases we don't want to get the way people used to always get. When I was a kid everyone got mumps, measles and chicken pox at some point when they were a child. I never knew of any one that died from these diseases but many children did. My son was vaccined against measles and mumps but there wasn't a vaccine against chicken pox in the 1980's as there is now. I remember that my parents were always taking us to the doctors for some sort of shot against something that had just been found. This was back in the 1950's. I guess we were lucky to get so many vaccines discovered at that time.
    The Black Death, or Plague, from about 1340 to 1350, was one of the worse pandemics before people learned about cleanliness and doctors leaned about germs and disease. The flu kills many people every year even now with most people getting a flu shot every year. So does Malaria, and AIDS. When I lived in New Mexico there would be a couple of cases of Hantavirus and The Plague each year although most people think those  diseases are gone. Legionnaires Disease still pops up every once in a while.
    Why do we keep thinking that there won't be any more pandemics? We think that because that is what we want. And then when we have another one, like now, most of us really don't know what to do.
    I really think that there are still a lot of people that do not understand how to be clean and keep germs down in their home. When I first saw things on TV and on the computer telling us how to wash our hands it really bamboozled me. I couldn't understand how anyone could not know that hand washing was one of the most necessary things that needed to be done to keep from getting sick. My parents allowed us to play in the dirt and we had all kinds of pets - dogs, cats, birds, fish, and turtles but we were always being told to wash our hands, with soap, after we were out making mud pies, or pulling weeks or petting the cats and dogs. We always had to wash before eating. I don't think we took baths or showers as often as I do now but we washed our faces and brushed our teeth each morning and every night before bed. We never seemed to be as sick from colds and flu as some of the other kids in school.
    I remember the story of how one family kept having cold after cold in their family. The doctor told the parents to let the dog lick the plates after they were finished eating, then to wash the plates like normal. They were leery of doing it but when they did the colds went away. Apparently the dishes were not being washed clean enough to get the germs off. Of course this was before the time of automatic dish washers. The saliva in a dogs mouth is known to kill lots of germs. But I don't think it would kill any of the Coronavirus germs.
   Nor do I think that a dogs saliva would have made a difference when the Plague was so bad in Europe. But cats did. Since the Plague seemed to be carried my rodents it was the cats that went out and killed the rodents that helped get rid of Plegue. Many people are upset that cats kill rodents saying it is mean to the little critter but if cats, and wild animals like foxes, coyotes, and  owls didn't kill mice we would be over run with them and that means we might have more deseases. I was horrified at how many mice were in the house we bought in Kentucky. Between my cats and some traps we seem to have gotten all of them that were in the house. But I do still see them out in the bean fields and in my yard when I go out at night sometimes. And no I will not use poison's to kill mice or other rodents. If an owl or hawk eats a mouse that has eaten poison the bird will die, too. That is not good.
     So ---- Who would have thought-----