Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five 049

• Though bananas may make you think of other things, a banana equivalent dose is actually a unit of measurement based on the amount of radiation that is absorbed by eating one banana.
• 1 banana equivalent dose is 0.01 mrem or one ten thousandth of a Gray.
• A chest x-ray is about a 1,000 bananas, whereas a flight from Melbourne to Johannesburg and back is about 1,400 bananas!
• However, this unit is a measure of the energy absorbed (similar to Gray or rad), not the biological effect of the radiation (Sievert or rem), so it is a little misleading (as discussed here).

Excerpt from Radiation Safety, 2004 compiled by M. Jo available at www.ehs.unr.edu/Documents/RadSafety.pdf

• Tony Abbot, the currently Leader of the Opposition in Australia. He is wearing a set of budgie smugglers.
• Not only does the Utopian Border Patrol say NO to softness… it prohibits the illegal transit of small avian wildlife.

• The Battle of Waterloo would be better named as The Great Tooth Bonanza.
• According to Stephanie Pain in the New Scientist, 2001:

“In the early part of the 19th century, patients with plenty of money but very few teeth were prepared to pay enormous sums for a good set of dentures. The best were made with real human teeth at the front. Most of the time demand for second-hand incisors far outstripped supply, but wars helped make up the shortfall. The windfall from Waterloo provided enough to ship supplies all round Europe and even across the Atlantic.”

• To learn more about French military victories, go to Google, enter in ‘french military victories’  and click on ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’. Or go straight to the Complete Military History of France.

• While the media likes stories about doctors, they particularly like stories that cast doctors in a bad light.
• A 2001 study published in the BMJ looked at articles in the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, and Daily Mail from 1980 to 2000. During this time the ratio of negative-to-positive stories was 2.3.
• Others believe that it depends what papers you read, and that tabloids give doctors worse press than broadsheets.
• Of course, in this age of blogging, doctors can now give themselves all the good press they want! Scr*w you Murdoch!

• Ali NY, Lo TY, Auvache VL, White PD. Bad press for doctors: 21 year survey of  three national newspapers. BMJ. 2001 Oct 6;323(7316):782-3. PMID: 11588080; PMCID: PMC57356.

• The ear-cough reflex was first described by Friedrich Arnold in 1832, he of Arnold’s nerve fame. This nerve is pops out of the jugular ganglion of the vagus nerve, spelunks its way through the tympanomastoid fissure, and hits pay dirt at the posterior and inferior meatal skin of the ear. So what‽ I hear you say, while smugly thinking how nice it was have had that interrobang handy…
• Well, the ear-cough reflex is also known as an Arnold’s nerve cough. Irritation of this nerve (aka the auricular branch of the vagus aka the Alderman’s nerve) can cause coughing. Chronic irritation — from a foreign body or impacted wax in the ear canal, or such like — can cause a chronic cough.
• Make sure you look in the ears of your coughing patient, it may save them a lot of needless tests!

• Jegoux F, Legent F, Beauvillain de Montreuil C. Chronic cough and ear wax. Lancet. 2002 Aug 24;360(9333):618. Erratum in: Lancet 2002 Oct 19;360(9341):1256.  PMID: 12241935.