When the Singing Stops

This is as yet all quite novel -- sheltering in place, working remotely, maintaining social distance. We are starting to see some among us fall: At least two CNN anchors are out with coronavirus. I would expect the toll among politicians to be especially severe. Many are elderly, they specialize in greeting people, touching people, thus they are prime candidates to catch the disease.
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There is a natural resilience, an urge to provide positive messages. The people in Italy, shut in, singing from their balconies. Here, a girl the next street over had a birthday. People wrote her birthday greetings in chalk on the sidewalk of her block.

But that is sadly only a phase. A deep depression is beginning to settle in as we collectively begin to perceive that this may be only a harbinger of worse things to come.

Reports are that the singing in Italy has ceased.

The current state of our medical philosophy seems to be that there is physical health and there is mental health -- two different categories.

Of course they are intimately related. My argument is by attending to the little daily physical tasks -- brewing coffee, washing dishes, sweeping floors, watering flowers -- we are simultaneously minding our mental health.

We *need* to keep doing these small things.

Take something as simple as peeling a banana. I was telling one of my grandchildren yesterday that the large, plump, yellow fruit we eat in this country is but one of many types of banana on this planet.

When you travel to the places where bananas are grown commercially -- Asia, Central America, Hawaii and many more, with India, China and Indonesia being the three largest, you see bananas of many different colors and sizes. One of my favorites is the mini banana, only a couple of inches long, very sweet with a very thin peel.

When you go to a shop in these growing regions, you see the full range of crops on display. Oddly, you may rarely see the dominant variety we know in this country. Most of those are exported while still green in refrigerated containers.

Like coffee, my inquiry into banana production grew out of my fixation on the Circle of Posion syndrome. Pesticides applied to banana trees rely on nematocides like DBCP to kill the nematodes (tiny worms) that feed on the roots of the plant.

DBCP proved to be very effective at doing its job; meanwhile the chemical was absorbed by the banana tree's roots and spread systemically, finally ending up deposited inside the peel in the fruit -- to the banana.

Yes, bananas grown in this industrial manner may contain small residues of pesticides, though they probably are of no consequence to those of us who eat bananas. The farmworkers who apply the pesticides are another matter.

Companies continued using DBCP overseas years after scientists here determined it caused sterility among the workers who manufactured it. In our travels investigating the Circle of Poison, we met with many farmworkers in countries like Costa Rica who couldn't reproduce due to exposure to DBCP.

But this story has a happy ending. Lawyers in the U.S. took up the cause of foreign banana workers and won them large legal settlements due to their sterility. The companies would have to develop less harmful alternative ways to control those pesky nematodes.

The happy ending is that the men's sterility proved to be only temporary. Their sperm counts gradually returned to normal once they were removed from exposure to DBCP.

It is not a perfect story. our society could have demanded that we perform the science necessary before putting many thousands of people through this ordeal, but we did not. The lessons remain -- test first, approve later.

Meanwhile, I think I'll go peel a banana.

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