Word: fatalism
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...through Elizabeth Foster, an elderly woman unaccountably stuck in Nice throughout World War II; to teenager Abby Green, who took a language course in the city in 1994 and found the topless bathing "liberating." One American who never visited Nice was Mark Twain. "Travel," he wrote in 1869, "is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness" - but then he never met the hordes following the lock-step of all-inclusive tours. Yet even in Twain's era many observers were aghast that tourism was making places like Nice increasingly dependent on revenues from visitors. Then it was the influx...
Human activities, though, may be part of this fatal mix. Some scientists, Geraci among them, connect a rise in marine-mammal deaths to a sharp increase in toxic plankton blooms--great eruptions of poisonous algae in the sea. As the toxins from these tiny plants pass up the food chain, they become increasingly concentrated until they contaminate the fish on which seals, sea lions and whales feed. Suspected causes of the blooms: the inadvertent fertilization of coastal waters by agriculture runoffs and, most alarmingly, the rise in seawater temperatures from global warming. If so, the death of the whales last...
Fortunately, the disease is relatively hard to catch. Fewer than 1% of humans who are infected actually get sick, and it does not spread from one person to another. But in a small percentage of cases, particularly those involving the elderly, it can be fatal. The virus causes flulike symptoms within three to 15 days and can lead to a dangerous inflammation of the brain...
Tricky as it is, try to be calm. (It helps to remember that only five or six of the 2,000 or so venomous bites a year are fatal.) On the other hand, symptoms can take a while to surface, so don't skip the hospital...
...investigators, who in mid-July were tipped off to the eerie coincidence, caution that it is too early to come to any conclusions. The fear, however, is that chronic wasting disease, a mad cow-like illness that affects wild game, may have jumped the so-called species barrier. The fatal disease, which makes animals listless, has been endemic in Colorado herds for decades and was spotted in Wisconsin deer in February. Particularly worrisome is the fact that the illness is caused by infectious agents called prions that are not destroyed by cooking...