Don’t miss  Linda Watanabe McFerrin’s new story “Bali Belly and the Zombie Apocalypse,” up today on World Hum, the best travel-zine in the Ethernet. Linda spins a spooky tale that will make you rethink your travel medicine bag. She proves, once again, that old travel-writers’ saw: Anything that doesn’t kill you is  fodder for great […]

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  Am I Crazy? As an autoimmune patient with APS, as a stroke  survivor on blood thinners, people sometimes ask why I travel to places teeming with opportunities for disaster. “Places where medical care is thin, the water is often unsafe and the food chancy; places with infectious diseases, malarial mosquitoes, venomous snakes and the […]

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  It’s a jungle out there and I just can’t get enough of it! Come help me celebrate publication of my story “Why I Still Travel to the Wild” at a book party sponsored by Left Coast Writers. It’s  on Monday evening, November 14, at 6 pm at Book Passage San Francisco store at the […]

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The Australians call them ‘mozzies’–such a cute name–as though mosquitoes were just pesky little creatures that buzz and bite, one of the minor annoyances of venturing off the beaten track. I used to think of them that way, too, until I started traveling to the tropics and meeting people who’d had malaria, dengue fever (its […]

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Here’s a great opportunity to learn more about autoimmune disease: a free public forum in San Francisco on Saturday, August 20, at the Westin San Francisco Market Street Hotel. Details at:  http://sanfranpublicforum.eventbrite.com/ Rita Baron-Faust, Author of The Autoimmune Connection, will speak on “Women and Autoimmunity: Making the Connection,” and Virginia. Ladd,  President and Executive Director […]

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  In May, I posted on the benefits of Vitamin D as a way to help reduce the risk of blood clots – as a stroke and APS (antiphospholipid syndrome) patient, that’s  always on my mind. Now a new study, reported in Internal Medicine News, has linked low Vitamin D to increased musculoskeletal pain. The […]

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There’s a thought-provoking article from Associated Press on the wire this week: Alzheimer’s debate: Test if you can’t treat it? The gist of the debate is this: with today’s more sophisticated tests–such as the diffusion MRI–it’s easier for doctors to identify brain damage (in the form of plaques) that might suggest someone is developing Alzheimer’s […]

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September offers an unusual opportunity to hear the latest on developments in diagnosis and treatment of Antiphospholipid Syndrome (APS) at a free one-hour webinar set for Tuesday, September 6, at 8:00 pm EDT (5:00 pm PDT). The discussion, sponsored by the American Society of Hematology (ASH), will include three presentations: Dr. Mark Crowther (McMaster University) […]

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For those of us who take Coumadin  (warfarin), Vitamin K is a boogeyman. That’s because K–found principally in dark leafy green vegetables like kale and Swiss chard and spinach that are supposed to be good for us–can inhibit the blood thinning effects of Coumadin.

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  June is APS awareness month – APS, the acronym for Antiphospholipid Syndrome, the blood clotting disorder that caused my stroke nine years ago. I remember feeling like the doomed heroine of a bad sci-fi when I first learned the cause of my stroke – an unpronounceable, incomprehensible disease: ‘Antiphospholipid Syndrome,’ or APS. I’d never […]

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