I was recently a guest on the Every Day Peace podcast with Dr. Dravon James:

The fascinating words in the news these days, where did they come from? We see fraternities and hurricanes named after the Greek Alphabet but they are also used by scientists. The many words used by modern medicine are from the Greek Alphabet as the go-to choice enabling a more neutral connotation on naming viruses.

The Greek Alphabet began in the Ninth Century, but originated from the Phoenician Alphabet. The Greeks added consonant’s to the vowels in their letters. The naming system, now used by W.H.O., makes public communication about virus variants easier and less confusing. They will use the Greek Alphabet.

Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, said she conducted many interviews with reporters this year, before the Greek naming system was announced, and she stumbled through confusing explanations about the variants. They are now known as Alpha, which emerged in the United Kingdom, and Beta, which emerged in South Africa. “It makes it really cumbersome to talk about when you’re constantly using an alphabet soup of variant designations,” she said, adding, “Ultimately people end up calling it the U.K. variant or the South African variant.”

That’s the other big reason that the W.H.O. moved to the Greek naming system, Dr. Rasmussen said: “The older naming convention was unfair to the people where the virus emerged. The agency called the practice of describing variants by the places they were detected “stigmatizing and discriminatory.”

“The practice of naming viruses for regions has also historically been misleading,” Dr. Rasmussen said. Ebola, for example, is named for a river that’s actually far from where the virus emerged. “From the very beginning of the pandemic, I remember people saying: ‘We called it the Spanish flu,’ Dr. Rasmussen said. “The Spanish flu did not come from Spain.”

The W.H.O. encouraged national authorities and media outlets to adopt the new labels. They do not replace the technical names, which convey important information to scientists and will continue to be used in research.

Source
The New York Times, 27 November 2021.

Greek Letters and Names:

I was recently a guest on the Wisdom of Ages podcast with Ayn Cates Sullivan:

What are the different ways of spirit? How can we evolve and become free? In this episode of Wisdom of Ages, host Ayn Cates Sullivan and guest Nora D’Ecclesis discuss the different traditions of cultures when it comes to spiritual approach. Furthermore, they tackle the Shinto tradition of Japanese, Haiku poetry, and the Japanese Tea Ceremony. Tune in and join Ayn and Nora as they talk more about global mysticism and multi-cultural mindfulness.

Click here to listen on Spotify

Click here to listen on Apple Podcasts

Who doesn’t love a barbecue on a summer day? The fun of family and friends, a few beers and juicy steak hot off the grill makes me salivate while writing about it. The picnic that includes a slightly burned hot dog, the Italian sausage with peppers and onions and rare hamburger brings up a visual of the perfect Saturday party outdoors. If we close our eyes we can almost feel the stress free environment created by the barbecue and certainly smell the meat cooking. 

There is that one guy off to the side eating salad and chicken wings with what appears to be a voracious appetite. He is the one with Alpha Gal allergy, he is the one who was bitten by a Lone Star tick. That day he pulled out the brownish tick with a white spot that altered his life in a way no one anticipated and wasn’t even described in the medical literature until 2009 as “strange meat allergy”. Using the technique of questing a tick attached itself to this unsuspecting victim and stayed long enough to puncture the skin and inject the Alpha-gal molecule. This could take less than an hour. The end result is that this man will probably never be able to eat red meat again without a potential life threatening allergic reaction (Commins & Platts-Mills, 2013). 

The Lone Star tick bite transfers galactose alpha 1,3 galactose from its gut into a victim when it bites a human. The human’s immune system then produces an IGE antibody to this sugar in the meat. When the human eats red meat after this process an allergic reaction between the IGE antibody produced by the human’s immune system and the alpha Gal sugar in the meat produces the allergic reaction.

The allergic reaction occurs when an IgE antibody reacts with the alpha gal molecule on the meat resulting in a release of histamine and other vasoactive amines which cause damage to capillary walls resulting in leakage of serum in the body tissues including airspaces in lungs and tissue in skin and other organs. Leakage of serum into the lungs may result in actual drowning of the patient in his own body fluid. This is part of anaphylactic shock and will result in death if not medically treated.

It would seem to the layman this is an easy problem to fix from a tick bite, it is easy to diagnose and easy to avoid by simply giving up meat, but it is not that simple and no one knows at this point if it ever gets better. Remember the physician in our anecdotal has had this for seven years with no change.

Most allergic reactions occur quickly, the bee sting can drop a person in minutes into a life threatening allergic reaction. The child who eats peanuts and gets itchy and has hives can die within minutes. This is not the case with this allergy caused by a tick bite, it is not for 4-8 hours that anyone feels the horrors of the allergic response. Therefore it might take months before the person having this allergy correlates it to the source. Most people look to the last thing they ate and have never read or been told an allergy can take 8 hours to emerge. 

Alpha Gal Allergy is a DELAYED 4-6 hours allergic response after eating mammal red meat.

Examples include:

• pork
• beef
• lamb
• venison
• rabbit
• goat
• bison

Or mammal products:

• beef broth
• bacon drippings
• protein powder
• cow’s milk
• cheese
• beef gelatins

Or in medical products:

• chemotherapy known as centuximab
• cardiac pig valves
• beef gelatins used in flu vaccines
• some dental gels

When a person eats mammal meat who has Alpha-Gal antibody the ingested meat causes a histamine release causing the allergy resulting in anaphylaxis. Anaphylactic shock causes death quickly if not treated by medical personnel. The only way to avoid this at this time is by avoiding all mammal products which is a great hardship and sometimes difficult task due to lack of information on the ingredients in many products or prepared meals. Fish and poultry are not mammalian meats and therefore have not been known to produce the allergy in most people.

Reference

Commins, S.P., & Platts-Mills, T.A. (2013). Delayed anaphylaxis to red meat in patients with IgE specific for galactose alpha-1,3-galactose (alpha-gal). Curr Allergy Asthma Res., 13(1), 72-77. doi: 10.1007/s11882-012-0315

Anyone having an affinity for writing a novel should read, The Great Gatsby, one of the greatest American novels written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. My journey as a novelist included reading every novel and most of the short stories published by Fitzgerald and then traveling to Asheville where he spent his final years with Zelda, his wife and muse. They had one child a girl named Scottie. F. Scott was born to an aristocratic father who lacked ambition and never achieved the status  F. Scott admired. All of the novels weaved a theme of affluent socialites, social elitism and the descent into addiction. Fitzgerald died in 1940 at age 44 from heart failure after years of alcohol abuse.

On an extended trip to Asheville to view where F. Scott Fitzgerald  made his final attempt to beat his addictions in 1935 and again 1936 I was able to walk the paths he walked at the Grove Point Inn and see the sight where he committed Zelda to a mental institution. She was predeceased by Fitzgerald eight years earlier and actually died in a fire in the Highland Hospital near Asheville where he left her as he made his way to California for a new life. The Grove Park Inn has an elevator to the rooms used by Fitzgerald which are kept as he left them in memory of the great author. By all accounts Scott, as Zelda called him, would take her out of the mental institution and have her join him for lunch at the Grove Park Inn on the terrace. I enjoyed all of my meals on the visit on that very same terrace area of the restaurant.

In 1935 Fitzgerald  felt he had one more chance to write and visited the Grove Park Inn with its magnificent views of the Blue Ridge Mountains, clean air and luxury accommodations to tame his insatiable desire for alcohol and write a new novel. He decided if only he could omit gin he would cure himself and switched to a case of beer a day. He also decided his wife was unresponsive to his need for her literary expertise and he flirted a great deal while in Asheville with other women perhaps to recapture or add to the long line of women who functioned to inspire him. Zelda once accused him of plagiarism when she noticed some of his novel taken directly from her diary. They agreed that the semi- autobiographical nature of his work should be a combined effort and joined forces to improve his career.

Mr. Fitzgerald was named for his relative Francis Scott Key who of course gave America the Star Spangled Banner. Francis Scott Fitzgerald  spent his early years in Minnesota born to an upper middle class family he also went to private schools eventually made his way to New Jersey to attend Newman High School a Catholic prep school in Hackensack. After graduating he stayed in New Jersey and enrolled in Princeton. As a matriculated Princeton student he met, fell into deep infatuation with Ginevra King who he dated and lost and eventually caused him to  flunk out of Princeton University before graduating. Yes, attachments according to the Buddha cause suffering, a concept probably not entertained by Fitzgerald. Since WWI was raging he enlisted but it was toward the end of the war, so he never deployed out of the United States.

Fitzgerald’s first novel was published in 1920, he called it This Side Of Paradise taking the title from Tiare Tahiti a poem by Brooke. It told his semi autobiographical story of being a Princeton student at the lower end of the social economic status, love lost, greed and status seeking. This was followed by three more novels, Beautiful and the Damned in 1922 this time about an affluent Harvard culture. In 1925 he wrote what many consider to be his masterpiece if not one of the greatest American novels ever written, The Great Gatsby detailing social climbing ambition, greed, and unrequited love during the party days of heavy drinking in the Jazz Age. Tender Is the Night published in 1934 detailing the marriage and the psychological intervention set in France. The Last Tycoon written in 1940 was not completed by Fitzgerald as he died from a heart attack and complications of alcohol addiction that year.

The Jazz Age, a phrase F. Scott Fitzgerald made famous complete with bathtubs filled with gin, drugs on the party coffee tables and yes dancing the Charleston Gatsby style are sights that remain with the reader forever. Hollywood has created two amazing movies of the The Great Gatsby further immortalizing that era. The Grove Park Inn has a September 24th celebration of F. Scott Fitzgerald when they open Rooms #441 and #443 to the public and finish the celebration with dancing the Charleston. In is an adventure that by today’s standards actually seems tame. It is also inspirational for future authors as they put pen to paper as Fitzgerald was known to do or they are writing into a computer program that spell checks, corrects syntax and formats the 21st Century novel!

All of the blog photos were taken at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, NC:

The Sachs Bridge in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania is the most haunted bridge in America! The Civil War Confederate retreat bridge exit went south over the Marsh Creek using the bridge to get home to the Confederate southern states. The bridge and creek provided water, shelter from the rain and was a make-shift hospital during the Battle of Gettysburg. Hundreds of men died on or near the bridge after being wounded during the July 3-4, 1863 battle between the North and South. That dramatic loss of life could account for the structure being haunted. However, three Confederate soldiers also dressed up as Union army and were caught as traitors. It’s hard to know if they were spies or deserters but they were hung from the wooden support beams and it is said their ghosts remain there.

The bridge was constructed as a truss covered bridge, inexpensive but ok for light travel. On July 1, 1863 two brigades of Union soldiers crossed the bridge heading town the inevitable battle. It was used again by Robert E. Lee’s army retreating over the bridge and heading South after the Union defeated the Confederates during the Battle of Gettysburg. The ability to provide water for all of the soldiers was also important so the Marsh Creek under the bridge was a strategic location.

 A few years back, William R. Forstchen and I visited the Gettysburg battlefield where I had the opportunity to interview him. As we sat in the equally haunted Farnsworth House eating our game pie Bill told me of the Sachs bridge ghost stories and promised to bring my family to visit it later that night. The interview is vividly descriptive of what we experienced first-hand at midnight. The energy was that of the horrors of all wars and the horrific loss of life. I felt their inevitable questions about the insanity of brother fighting against brother and civil war within a nation. Mostly, I sensed the energetic cries of pain from the wounds both physical and mental from all soldiers who crossed the Sachs Bridge as I walked alone across the bridge in the dark. Our group sent healing energy and prayers.

Guest Blog by William R. Forstchen, Ph.D. 
New York Times Bestselling Author 

There are two sites in Pennsylvania that everyone must put on their “Bucket List”. . .Gettysburg and just off the battlefield national Park, the  Sachs Bridge, Gettysburg. As Joshua Chamberlain, who received the Medal of Honor for his gallant stand on the second day of the battle, said of that storied field, “it is the vision place of souls.” But there is another vision place just a few minutes from the battlefield. Sachs Bridge.

If you drive from the center of town southward, you’ll pass straight through the middle of ground where Pickett’s division charged towards their doomed “high water mark.” Head down another mile to where Emmitsburg road comes to an intersection at the “Peach Orchard, where Union general Dan Sickles men fell by the thousands, and turn right. Go about a mile or two, slow down, cross over a concrete bridge and you will see Sachs Covered Bridge on your left.

Best to pull in and stop there at night because you are about to enter one of the most haunted spots in America. During the day it is a picturesque place, a covered bridge built in 1852, a good spot to take the family, kids love playing around inside it. But once darkness falls, leave the kids home or back at the motel because you might very well enter the Twilight Zone.

During the Battle of Gettysburg, thousands of wounded Confederate soldiers were carried back to the small stream under the bridge, temporarily turning it into a vast hospital area. The day after the battle, it poured buckets of rain while Robert E. Lee’s shattered army prepared to evacuate the stricken field and retreat back towards Maryland and Virginia. Every wagon they could lay their hands on, most all springless, were loaded up for the agonizing journey home. As the night of July 4th fell, thousands of wounded were evacuated, across the Sachs Bridge. Eyewitness accounts told how the bridge floor was soon soaked in blood from wounded and dying men.

Their hellish night still echoes nearly a 160 years later. The first time I went there, I had heard the stories, wanted to check it out, I got out of the car, several people were hanging around with cameras and what could be called “ghost hunting” equipment. A Gettysburg police officer came up causing parking concern, but instead he got out of his car, was friendly enough and asked if I had seen anything that evening. That was interesting coming from a policeman. He then said we were okay visiting the site but “just be careful,” and he wasn’t talking about falling into the creek. He was talking about spirits of the dead.

He told us a few stories of his own encounters including one where he was crossing the concrete bridge next to Sachs Bridge and it was glowing red. He thought it was on fire, he punched his lights on and started to call the fire department, but as he raced up to the west end of the bridge he saw. . . a red pulsing glow inside, but no flame and suddenly it just winked off. He cancelled the call to the fire department, and said that talking later with a couple of firemen they said that he wasn’t the first to call in that the bridge was burning but there was no flame and then the glow just “winked out.”

Well the challenge was on. I actually do believe in ghosts but not the type that would make a bridge look like it was on fire. And then it started. I guess I would say it was a feeling of dread, of sadness, of loss, but also that my presence was not alone.

It is hard to describe. I have felt a strange connection to that long distant struggle since I was a child of five. Growing up I read voraciously, played with my huge army of Civil War soldiers and in my backyard lead charge after charge with my neighbor and first and still best friend Nora D’Ecclesis. Maybe I was therefore “attuned” to that place.

And then it happened. I turned around to snap a flash photo which instantly came up on the screen. I was saying it to those lost souls in the bridge as well. The image revealed a coiling cloud of something smoke like behind me and the feeling of a sad painful death and dying surrounded me.

I’ve been back at least half a dozen times since, the last time with Nora Lee in tow. We went at midnight and well Nora will tell her story. What I find now at that bridge is sadness, infinite sadness. Thousands of men, many of them still boys, torn, bleeding dying at they took that journey from the field of lost glory. If they lived but another hour, or died abed seventy years hence, that night stayed with them and in turn they left something of themselves there as well.

Sach’s Bridge … “it is the vision place of souls.”