I’m probably supposed to be writing about fitting disease spread modeling to NY death curves, or finishing reviewing moon trip documentaries, or… well… I even wonder if my 3rd grade teacher is still alive — probably that homework at least I can give up on.
But I got sick!
Which happens sometimes, but never is really anything to write home about. Or even a substack.
But this one was weird! I got something called Hand Foot & Mouth disease!
And it kicked my ass a few days ago!
Which I’m told1 means I can check off yet another piece missed in my childhood development.
By the way, everywhere one searches on this, they quickly try to make it abundantly clear it is not this:
And I think that’s anyway pretty clear.
Because I am not a cow.
I am also not here by the way, going to comment on that whole Mad Cow supposed outbreak, and the following beef panic, and how it made it really hard to get good instant ramen imported into the US.
But OK. So the story goes like this:
Kid #3 started it. Its usually kid #3.
I was doing something with kid #2, and called home to make sure kid #3 was getting staged up for transportation to the next thing. 15 minutes later, wife calls: “He’s puking. Probably not going to happen”. Brief information exchange, past meal summary, fever check… yep. OK.
We arrive home to find a RDIFoB2 sleeping bag deployed with a pale kid #3 in position.
And there’s really nothing unusual here — kid’s young. RDIFoB sessions happen several times a year. All 3 are pukers at the first sign of fever.
And so it goes… Kid #3 trending positive, then kid #1 goes down. But thats fine — he knows the drill and self deploys.
Later that night… like 2 AM of course, kid #3, having been authorized to return to his actual bed, stumbles into the room complaining his feet are itchy. Wife looks and declares: “手足口病や!“
Which you’d probably think was weird, but she’s Japanese.
“手足口病” literally translates as “Hand, Foot & Mouth disease”, just like we say in English.
But we decided it didn’t quite make sense. Symptoms didn’t seem to quite line up and he wasn’t an infant anymore, irrespective of some observed behavior.
And so it goes… its apparently my turn. Throat tickle — start of a solid headache. After a bit, see things going downhill fast, so move some meetings, and arrange to flake out on the couch for the afternoon. Don’t remember a whole lot there beyond a pretty solid headache, not really helped by my trying to avoid anything pharma. Lots of pinching the gap between thumb and forefinger, with limited success.
Next day fever’s done, but still with splitting headache & throat now on fire. But slowly improving — caffeine helped the headache a bit. Got through a zoom meeting or two.
And then the next day headache gone, sore throat waning, but… Huh. I didn’t think I had burned my finger there but.. Oh wait where did those dots come from. Kid #1 was across the hall, hopefully on his last day out of school. “Show me your hands”. “Oh you mean these?” Shows me hands with similar spots.
I shout downstairs “やっぱり手足口病や!“
Which you’d probably think was weird, but do you really think I’d end up marrying a Japanese woman if I didn’t speak Japanese too?
But it was weird.
Because the Japanese word is 手足口病: “hand, foot and mouth disease”. Literally the direct translation from English, “Hand foot and mouth disease”. Now on one hand that name makes sense anywhere3 — because thats literally where it manifests in most cases, eventually with spots on your hands, feet and around the mouth (only hands in my case — hands and feet with the kids).
But why should the names be direct translations of each other? Chicken pox is not a direct translation (水痘, the first character being ‘water’ — having nothing to do with chickens). Measles is not a direct translation (麻疹, from the Chinese, first character meaning ‘hemp’, apparently having something to do with funeral wrappings, second meaning ‘rash’). These are old diseases, known before the bugs we attribute them to were known. Different cultures knew them before knowing each other, so names shouldn’t necessarily have anything to do with each other.
This made me wonder if it was recently introduced. Because also I don’t have any memory of kids being out of school with something like that when I was a kid. I knew chickenpox, I knew of mono. Flu. I only ever heard of this after I had kids of my own. Wife was same way — she learned about it when we brought in kids to Japanese school a few years ago.
Poking around, it appears it is recent — first isolated in 1957:
First isolated in the 50’s?
As we’re embarking on large scale vaccination campaigns for things like polio…
RSV also came about around this time4. It’s a gift to humanity from the polio vaccine effort.
Was HFMD also a gift from a vaccine effort in some way?
Did I get it now because its widespread introduction to humanity came late enough that I happened to miss it as a child?
Is this a concern now for the elderly, attributed perhaps to immune senescence, but maybe more because they’re old enough to not have seen it as children?
Many kids out of school around here due to ‘covid’ and in fact this — teacher friends told me the other day that kids were dropping like flies at school due to HFMD. My first thought actually, had my now antivaxxing family not been hit by this, would have been is this emerging due to immunosuppression from covid and now flu and now RSV shots5? But maybe no… We got it too…
Have I now gained the lifetime immunity implied by the messaging this is a disease of young children?
Or is this mutating like flu and cold viruses, and will also revisit us seasonally (in this case apparently summer and fall)?
Do covid tests go positive with HFMD? Is that why there are also so many concurrent ‘covid’ absences? Is this covid toes6?
Do we really know how this affliction came about? Is there some historical record of this apparently common childhood (and not — I have adult relatives who have gotten this in past years, and almost 1/4 of the cases in the above paper were ‘adults’) disease, say, 100 years ago? If not, why is it with us now?
Did you think I had answers these questions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand%2C_foot%2C_and_mouth_disease
Rapid Deployment In Front of Bathroom — We’ve learned over the years, arranging this sort of thing ahead of time, with the appropriate training, helps survivability of carpets and furniture. Unpredictably erupting children then most likely unpredictably erupt onto an easily washable surface. They’re not usually in a condition to care too much, but can easily be convinced its like camping.
Often used with the AtRIFoBPB — At the Ready In Front of Bathroom Puke Bowl.
My suggestion to the CDC last year that Monkeypox be renamed “Asspox” due to where it apparently presents was unfortunately ignored.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/chimpanzees-children-origins-respiratory-syncytial-virus/
https://www.cdc.gov/respiratory-viruses/whats-new/getting-vaccines-at-same-time.html
https://www.webmd.com/covid/what-are-covid-toes
OH and having kiddos you do get all of the diseases. It is fun. being sick again just like when you were a kid. "brings back memories" as my mom would say 🙁😋😃
I'm happy to hear you and your kids are better, and your wife hopefully, it sounds like, she didnt get it.🙏🌹
I also suspect the origin of some viruses. Contaminated vaccines. Maybe they used cow tissues in some jabs, shipped them to New zealand where it was found in humans. More homework might turn up answers... or raise more questions.