It
seems harmless enough. You get nose to nose with your dog and talk to
it as it laps at your mouth and cheeks with its tongue, or you come home
from work and bring your lips to your dog’s in a greeting to say hello.
It may feel like the ultimate display of affection, but when it comes to such kisses, experts caution: Beware of dogs.
What’s the harm?
Dr. Neilanjan Nandi, an assistant professor of medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine
in Philadelphia, said in an email that most animals’ mouths are host to
“an enormous oral microbiome of bacteria, viruses and yeast.”
Dr.
Nandi says a dog’s saliva has proteins that may help cleanse or heal
its own wounds, but in a paragraph titled “Why Not to Make Out With Your
Pet,” he noted, “There are some organisms unique to dogs that we were
simply not meant to tolerate or combat.”
Some bacteria in dogs’ mouths are zoonotic, meaning the animals can pass them to humans and cause disease.
Some common zoonotic bacteria include clostridium, E. coli, salmonella and campylobacter, which can cause severe gastrointestinal disease in humans, said Dr. Leni K. Kaplan, a lecturer of community practice service at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine.
So I shouldn’t let my dog lick me at all?
Not entirely.
“When
dog saliva touches intact human skin, especially in a healthy person,
it is extremely unlikely to cause any problems, as there will be very
little absorption through the skin,” Dr. Kaplan wrote in an email.
However,
a dog’s saliva and pathogens can be absorbed more easily through the
mucous membranes of a person’s nose, mouth and eyes. Though illnesses
transmitted this way are rare, Dr. Kaplan said it was best to avoid
having your dog lick those parts of your face.
John Oxford,
a professor of virology at Queen Mary University of London and an
expert in microbiology, said he would never let a dog lick his face, The Hippocratic Post reported.
“It
is not just what is carried in saliva,” he said. “Dogs spend half of
their life with their noses in nasty corners or hovering over dog
droppings so their muzzles are full of bacteria, viruses and germs of
all sorts.”
What other illnesses can be transmitted?
Other
infections, such as hookworms and roundworms, can be transmitted in a
practice called coprophagia, in which animals ingest one another’s stool
or by licking each others’ anuses, Dr. Nandi said in an email.
Dr. Joe Kinnarney, the immediate past president of the American Veterinary Medical Association,
said in an interview that one study calculated that a puppy could have
as many as 20 million to 30 million roundworm eggs in its intestinal
tract in one week. He said a client’s child at his practice in
Greensboro, N.C., nearly lost an eye from a roundworm infection.
It
is conceivable that a dog with fecal material in its mouth could
transmit an intestinal parasite to a human through licking, but that is
rare, Dr. Sarah Proctor,
a clinical assistant professor and the director of the veterinary
technology program at the University of New Hampshire, said in an email.
More
commonly, a parasite can be contracted by ingesting contaminated soil —
via a home garden, for example — where pets have left their droppings.
“I
still don’t let Sunny and Bo lick me, because when I walk them on the
side lawn, some of the things I see them picking up and chewing on, I
don’t want that, man,” Mr. Obama said, laughing.
“Most
people do not pick up on a dog’s subtle body language that shows fear,
stress or aggression,” she wrote. “Putting your face into a dog’s face
and kissing it could lead to a bite on the face if you are not careful.”
What about, you know, cats?
Cats do not eat feces, and humans are therefore unlikely to become infected by parasites from them, according to the website petMD.
Arden Moore, who hosts “Oh Behave,”
a podcast on Pet Life Radio, said in an email that she welcomed the
occasional kiss from her five dogs and one cat, and kisses the tops of
their heads in return.
“Pets,
just like people, crave attention and affection,” she said. “As long as
I remain healthy and my pets stay healthy, I will take this ‘risk’ and
accept their kisses.”
President Barack Obama’s remarks about Donald Trump in his Monday press conferencecontained
some of the most ominous words I’ve heard since news networks began
calling the election for Trump early last Wednesday morning. But you may
not have heard them.
It
is an understatement to say that Obama’s departure from the White House
is occurring under unusual circumstances. He is managing a transition
to the presidency of someone he believes is unfit for that office, who
has empowered racist hate groups, wants to undo the Obama presidency,
and shouldn’t be entrusted with nuclear weapons.
Despite all
that, but also in a sense precisely because of all that, Obama is
planning to play something like mentor to Trump over the coming
weeks—something that doesn’t normally happen between outgoing presidents
and incoming ones when the latter is acceptably disciplined and
competent. In a tense environment where reporters,
government workers, world leaders, and anxious citizens and immigrants
understandably are scrutinizing every Donald Trump tweet and utterance
and leak, Obama’s closing thoughts on the presidency and his successor
will be given short shrift. But the things he says about
the transition contain critical information about its progress and his
confidence that, on the other side of it, things will run smoothly. His Monday comments suggests he has very little confidence that they will. here is a text and a subtext to everything politicians say in public,
even ones without more elections to run. It was the subtext of Obama’s
press conference that unnerved me.
On the surface, his
performance was reassuring. He was chipper. He did not doomsay. He
searched for the generous and hopeful things to say about Trump and
Trump’s designs on the presidency. But on close reading the sum total of
his remarks was frightening—a stage-setting, at the very least, for an
administration Obama expects will be hobbled by incompetence and likely
to fail.
Obama kept returning to three basic themes: that
Trump will be given every opportunity to succeed, thanks to the tutelage
Obama and his team will be providing, and the fact Trump won’t be
inheriting massive crises—which should give him the kind of running room
Obama never enjoyed; that the work of a presidency is
ceaseless, and much of it highly detail-oriented; and finally that
Trump’s grasp of what he’s been elected to do is at best remedial.
Obama
may be subtly trying to communicate to the Trump transition team that
they need to make massive strides, and quickly, or they will be, in
Obama’s words, “swamped.” But his expectation that Trump and his
entourage will get their act together is clearly very low.
“The most important point I made,” Obama told reporters at the White House, referring to his conversation last week with Trump,
“was that how you staff—particularly your chief of staff, your national
security adviser, your White House counsel, how you set up a process
and a system to surface information, generate options for a president,
understanding that ultimately the president is going to be the final
decision maker, that that’s something that’s going to have to be
attended to right away.”
This was all accurate, but it was a
way of saying that Trump is the first president in living memory not to
have even passing knowledge of how a White House operation runs.
Obama repeatedly touted
the fact that Trump will be inheriting many advantages: low
unemployment, rising incomes and wages, a historically low uninsurance
rate, stable financial systems, a high stock market, strong
international alliances, and cheap gasoline. Given the baseline Trump
will inherit, Obama’s reminder that “the American people will judge over
the next couple of years whether they like what they see” suggests a
suspicion that many of these metrics will worsen once Trump takes over.
When he was stumping for Hillary Clinton, Obama frequently returned to an immutable fact about the presidency:
that the office doesn’t change an inhabitant’s temperamental failures,
but magnifies them. On Monday, Obama suggested that the only way around
this potentially catastrophic problem for Trump would be to outsource
aspects of the job which don’t suit his temperament to less erratic
people.
Obama explained how this presidency hack worked in his case:
This
may seem like a silly example, but I know myself well enough to know I
can’t keep track of paper. I am not well organized in that way. And so
pretty quickly, after I’m getting stacks of briefing books coming in
every night, I say to myself, I’ve got to figure out a system because I
have bad filing, sorting and organizing habits. And I’ve got to find
some people who can help me keep track of this stuff. That seems
trivial, but actually it ends up being a pretty big piece of business.
The
analogy would’ve been amusing but for the fact that, whether he can
keep his desk and files organized or not, Trump can’t focus long enough
to read through “stacks of briefing books coming in every night” to
begin with. Reading
comprehension and patience only scratch the surface of difficulties
Trump will face. “I think there will be certain elements of his
temperament that will not serve him well unless he recognizes them and
corrects them,” Obama added, “because when you’re a candidate and you
say something that is inaccurate or controversial, it has less impact
than it does when you’re president of the United States. Everybody
around the world is paying attention, markets moves. National security
issues require a level of precision in order to make sure you don’t make
mistakes. I think he recognizes that this is different.”
Trump
may or may not need someone to set up a filing system for him, but he’ll
need people to do his reading, and to keep him from making shit up or
reflexively attacking his enemies in public. The consequences of failing
to outsource these tasks to people with better temperament won’t be a
disorganized workspace, but crashing markets and accidental wars.
On
the campaign trail, Trump responded to relatively trivial setbacks by
grinding campaign norms into dust. One of his favorite tactics was
positing a variety of fake realities (international conspiracies, the
fictional crimes of his enemies, the imagined hellscapes of inner
cities) meant to turn his base’s focus away from some new mortifying
revelation and back to the demagogic message of his candidacy.
Obama’s
warning to Trump, and everyone who stands to suffer for his errors, is
that living in a rhetorical fantasy will backfire on a president.
“Regardless of what experience or assumptions he brought to the office,
this office has a way of waking you up,” Obama said. “And those aspects
of his positions or predispositions that don’t match up with reality—he
will find shaken up pretty quick, because reality has a way of asserting
itself.”
Should Trump respond to such shakeups by transgressing
governing norms, where he once transgressed campaigning norms, Obama
warned that he would find himself in the midst of scandal or crime.
“One
of the things you discover about being president is that there are all
these rules and norms and laws and you’ve got to pay attention to them,”
Obama said, as if the president-elect weren’t a 70-year-old person with
a fancy education. “The people who work for you are also subject to
those rules and norms. And that’s a piece of advice that I gave to the
incoming president.”
Obama’s presidency was historically
uncorrupt and free from major scandal, but that is not typical in U.S.
history. George W. Bush’s administration festered with scandal and
corruption, even though Bush had governing experience and enough
integrity not to let his presidency become a source of personal
enrichment. Bill Clinton’s White House, though misremembered by
Republicans as one part Saturnalia, one part Nixonian crime den, wasn’t
scandal-free either.
“We listened to the lawyers,” Obama said,
“and we had a strong White House Counsel’s Office. We had a strong
Ethics Office. We had people in every agency whose job it was to remind
people, this is how you’re supposed to do things…. We had to just try to
institutionalize this as much as we could. And that takes a lot of
work. And one of my suggestions to the incoming president is, is that he
take that part of the job seriously, as well.”
Because of the
unique and awkward position he finds himself in, Obama can’t trash the
incoming president or sow panic about the country’s coming stewardship.
But it isn’t normal for an outgoing president to have to tell the
incoming one he should follow the law, and that aspects of his
temperament might get him into an economic crisis or a war or a massive
corruption scandal. It’s certainly not normal for him to warn the public
about it, however subtly, either.
We’ve become accustomed to some
very high standards of behavior, and complacent—or even frustrated—with
a slow, steady improvement upon the status quo Obama inherited eight
years ago. This is Obama’s only way of preparing us for some abrupt and
ugly reversals. We ought to listen very closely.
By now, you've probably become familiar with the mannequin challenge
— the latest internet trend, wherein people on video act as if they're
frozen in time. But for those of you who haven't, you're about to learn
from the best:
Yes, okay, everyone’s going to be Harley Quinn tonight, we get it.
But what if everyone thinks *everyone* will be Harley Quinn, and then no
one decides to be Harley Quinn? Then, is it possible that you’re the
only one that could be Harley Quinn?
That’s a lot of times to use ‘Harley Quinn’ in a paragraph, but
nevermind, we have THE video tutorial here! You know, in case you still
haven’t decided your costume, and you are still in awe about Margot
Robbie’s depiction of her, like we are. Chloé Boucher does an excellent
job here, transforming herself into many people’s favorite character
from Suicide Squad.
So get your makeup ready, and let’s be honest, you’ve probably
ordered the “Property Of The Joker” jacket from eBay, find your
childhool baseball bat, and let’s get started.
After all, we all have a little Harley inside, right?
There are a lot of talented people out there and we really should
appreciate them. Also, watching them do their thing inspires me so much.
My favorites are makeup artists, they can create anything from scary to
beautiful, from beautiful to real. Let me ask you one question though:
“How many times have you wanted to look like a celebrity?” Probably a
thousand times. Only watching the right tutorials and with the right
tips can you do that. Below we have a Jack Sparrow makeup transformation
which can be very useful for Halloween too. Enjoy!
Do you have difficulties finding the perfect lipstick color you want? Why not do it yourself? Yes, there is a very easy, quick and cheap way of doing your own lipstick whatever color you want and how much you want it! It’s called nail polish lipstick because after watching this video you will see how cool it looks having a lipstick in a nail polish container and how easy is actually applying it with a nail polish brush!
All you need for this DIY project is eyeshadow pigments, some lip gloss and a chapstick, with a sprinkle of your love and there you go! You will have the most unique lipstick ever! Enjoy!
For a bigger eye effect don’t connect the eyeliner in the outer corners of your eyes. Try to leave a little gap between. For even brighter eye look add a nude liner along your bottom waterline.
If you don’t like to look as you are in the ’80s than don’t apply eyeshadow all the way up the brows. Use the color on the outer corners of the eyes. If you compare the pictures below you will see that Emma Stone looks more fresh and youthful.
Don’t draw your brows to long at the ends. It will make you look sleepy. To know exactly where is the limit place an eyeliner pencil from the corner of your nose towards the outer corner of your eye. The tail of your brow has to be here. To know where to start place an eyeliner pencil on your nostril vertically. And the perfect indicator for the arch place is a pencil pointed through the pupil.
Do you have difficulties finding the perfect lipstick color you want? Why not do it yourself? Yes, there is a very easy, quick and c...
It seems harmless enough. You get nose to nose with your dog and talk to it as it laps at your mouth and cheeks with its tongue, or ...
