Facets of Our Lives

We are in the thick of the race for President here in the United States, but the ongoing circus that has been the selection process for the Republican candidate has not been the only news. Last week, in the continuing War on Women, a leading breast-cancer focused charity, Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure announced that it would no longer provide grants to Planned Parenthood ("PP"), the leading provider of women's health services to poor and underserved populations in the U.S. The Komen organization stated that their new criteria for providing funds to other organizations required that such organizations not be under federal or state investigation, and PP is currently under such investigation. The reaction to this decision and the "criteria" has been swift and vocal, both from pundits and the general public, and the Komen organization has been forced to reverse their decision. The damage, however, has been done. So why did this all happen? PP also happens...

Roughly 75% of the US population lives east of the Mississippi River. This portion of the country, on the whole, is wetter, greener, and at a lower elevation than the western portion of the continental states. Just like humans, our pets are susceptible to different kinds of illnesses that are specific to region. For example, when I lived in the Northeast, the population of wild deer resulted in a large population of deer ticks , and some form of preventative measure was a monthly ritual to protect the dogs. Here in the Southwest, we have deer in the higher, mountainous elevations, but not in the desert, where I live -- so this ritual became almost immediately unnecessary. One of the unique pet maladies for my region of Arizona is a condition called "Valley Fever", also called "California Disease", "Desert Rheumatism", or its official name Coccidioidomycosis . This is also one of those unique diseases that also impacts humans. It is not curable, which m...