Where is the next disease pandemic lurking? Will it find us … or will we find it? For decades scientists and virologists were posing these questions.
As Bill Gates pointed out in his 2015 TED talk, “If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes.” And “we are not ready for the next epidemic”, he concluded then.
Are we ready now?
THE END
“Around the corner, I met Anne Braveman, seventy-nine, and Rita Kahn, eighty-six, who told me they had gone to the movies the week before. It wasn’t some official, prearranged group outing. It was just two friends who decided they wanted to go see The King’s Speech on a Thursday night… A nursing assistant had to agree to join them. Braveman was paralyzed from the waist down due to multiple sclerosis and got around by motorized wheelchair; Kahn was prone to falls and needed a walker. They had to pay the $15 fare for a wheelchair-accessible vehicle to take them. But it was possible for them to go. They were looking forward to watching Sex and the City on DVD next.
“Have you read Fifty Shades of Grey yet?” Kahn asked me, impishly.
I allowed, modestly, that I had not.
“I had never heard of chains and that stuff,” she said, marvelling. Had I? she wanted to know.
I really didn’t want to answer that…”
(from Being Mortal by Atul Gawande)
We do not stop having fun when we get old.
We get old when we stop having fun…
THE END
Credits: Image from searchgi.com
It’s time to say goodbye to 2019. Let’s remember all the special moments we had that year, forget all the bad and walk into 2020 with a clear heart and mind…
It’s time to unfold new pages and start a new chapter in our lives because it is a New Year….
Have a very happy New Year full of joy, smiles and laughter…
New year, new life…
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
THE END
“There is no worse evil than a bad woman;
and nothing has ever been produced better than a good one.”
Euripides (480-406 BC)
From DeviantArt
THE END
“Beware of pretty faces that you find,
a pretty face can hide an evil mind.”
Johnny Ramistella
THE END
You fall, you rise, you make mistakes,
you live, you learn.
You’re human, not perfect.
You’ve been hurt, but you’re alive.
Think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—
to breathe, to think, to enjoy,
and to chase the things you love.
Sometimes there is sadness in our journey,
but there is also lots of beauty.
We must keep putting one foot in front of the other
even when we hurt,
for we will never know what is waiting for us
just around the bend…
Author unknown
Sometimes it takes a good fall to really know where you stand…
Do not let that one mistake to control your whole life…
THE END
