If you've been following the swine flu scare, you'll be aware that it (predictably) arrived in Japan a couple of weeks after it was detected in the US and, just as predictably, set off a pandemic here. The WHO is thinking of declaring it "Level 6" all on account of Japan. (I sit here with a mask holding a couple of pieces of garlic in my nose because I am in honest-to-goodness pain and think I may have it.)
Anyone who has spent much time here knows that Japan was a powder keg waiting to blow. Children typically learn no manners with regard to spreading respiratory diseases, possibly because of an "old wives' tale" (awful term for it) that spreading the disease to others helps a person recover. I heard some years back that 40% of Japanese children have a cold at any given time, and that figure looked accurate to me. Further, I associate Tokyo's trains with a kind of hunched, open-mouthed, tongue-rolled-into-a-tube stance characteristic of someone coughing at you. This was common among adults!
But as we know here on this forum, that is not the only factor involved. People live here with power lines directly outside their second-story bedroom windows and straight overhead as they walk down streets. They sit on the floor straight above fluorescent lights on the ceiling of the floor below. They are jam-packed into trains where a good half of them thumb away at their phones for the duration. In short, they live in an environment of intensive electricity and wireless usage of which they remain unaware. If they suffer from immune dysfunction, everyone else around them does too, so they think it is normal.
Having gotten out of that and gotten my EMF environment mostly under control, I find I can tolerate coughing, sneezing children with no worries about catching it myself.
What happened to me this time was the annual trip to Shikoku for training among people who use their cell phones in class. Because I'm not the teacher, it means I have to tolerate this, although I have asserted my right to sit away from the heaviest users in a place I have ascertained is not directly above fluorescent lights. But there is only so much you can do, and at the end of the five days, I was getting arrhythmia, which is a sign I've been exposed a lot. Worse, the trip home takes me through EMF corridors (train or highway), with a rest stop in Kobe, which is one place where the flu has been spreading. But the real killer for me may have been Tokyo, where I had to spend about 24 hours under awful EMF circumstances.
I had better sign off here, because even though this computer is low-emission, I still notice an effect from long usage. Paul, you popped a cork with me here. There has been so much I have wanted to share, but couldn't.