Recently in Health, Science and Medicine Category

Writing in the Daily Telegraph of Australia, Tim Blair furthers the Elvis-Michael Jackson-link meme by comparing Jackson's personal physician Dr. Conrad Murray with Elvis' notorious sawbones Dr. George Nichopoulos, aka "Dr. Nick." I can't vouch for the accuracy of all the Elvis lore, but Blair presents it with his usual verve:

At one point the colourful Memphis medico was charged with oversupplying drugs to Presley after a TV investigation discovered that he'd prescribed the singer more than 5300 tablets in the seven months prior to Presley's death. Dr Nick beat the charge. Incredibly, his lawyers were able to show that this huge quantity of drugs actually represented a bid to reduce the amount Presley previously consumed.
The boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, had an appetite for more than just fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

Blair moves on to mention that just as Dr. Nick accompanied Elvis during his late-career stand in Las Vegas, Murray had taken a leave of absence from his practice (which happened to be in Vegas) to be by Michael's side during the looming 50-show run in London. And he includes a helpful rundown of the pharmacopia found in Elvis' system, as well as a list of drugs that Michael is believed to have been taking.

Finally, Blair links to an episode of the hilarious online cartoon Achewood that pretty well sums up the impact of Michael's death on us 30-somethings ...

I just ran across this news release about Tropical Nut & Fruit Co.'s distribution plant in Memphis earning the 2008 Audit Platinum Award from the food-testing company Silliker Inc.  Tropical Nut & Fruit has more than 3,000 products, including nuts, snack mixes, dried fruit and the like. Silliker VP Rena M. Pierami praised "the preparedness of their highly dedicated safety teams and the outstanding integration of their quality assurance systems." Recent news has shown that nut-packing plants that don't follow safety guidelines can cause major problems, so kudos to all the workers in the Memphis plant for doing their job so well.

Scripps Howard News Service leads a story about radioactive materials ending up in Tennessee's recycling system with an item about Memphis.

When a metal recycler north of Memphis, Tenn., inadvertently mixed radioactive material into a new batch of metal in 1997, employees at the facility didn't know about it for three days, state documents show.

Contained in a piece of metal scrap, the radioactive isotope Americium-241 slipped into White Salvage's scrap-metal supply at its Ripley, Tenn., plant, blending into a new batch of aluminum. The contamination was not discovered until a shipment of the newly made material reached Memphis metal broker Southern Tin three days later.

The case was one of about 880 from Tennessee that are contained in a national database of nuclear-materials events, most of which occurred since 1990.

Americium-241, which the EPA says can pose significant health risks, is commonly found in smoke detectors, and it probably slipped through the cracks and was blended with other scrap.

If you're suffering through late-spring allergy season and you're about ready to move out of the Mid-South to find relief, don't go to Latin America. That's what I'm taking from reports of a study by Dr. Michael S. Blaiss of the University of Tennessee-Memphis. Blaiss found that nasal allergies suck just as bad in countries like Mexico, Brazil and Argentina as they do in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Apparently, this wasn't exactly what Blaiss expected from the research:

"What really surprised me about how much was identical, especially when we got into treatments and quality of life, was that this condition impacts people in Latin America as bad as we saw in the United States," Blaiss said.

However, Latin Americans are able to find relief at least at certain times of the year, which is more than some of us in the Mid-South can say:

"Unlike what we saw in the US, where most patients complained of year-round allergy symptoms, in Latin America, most of the patients had seasonal allergy symptoms," Blaiss commented.