Opps, I guess I had a different species of roundworm--possibly the species Mansonella streptocerca?--not hookworm. He lived in my foot for two months before an Italian doctor gave me some anti-parasite medicine that killed the little bugger dead in his tracks within a couple of hours. Before that, I suffered through numerous local remedies, including snail piss, with no success. Very itchy. The locals thought it was funny that the stupid white man who didn't wear shoes would get something like that.
Done stretching ready for the 'mill
That might be it. He did seem rather lost, wandering around aimlessly in my foot for the better part of two months. He would progress very slowly so I'm assuming he wouldn't be visible to the naked eye. I certainly wasn't successful trying to scratch him out.It could have been canine hookworm. Since dogs and we have different enzymes (or something), canine hookworm gets lost in our system and cannot find the bloodstream to get to our lungs to complete the cycle. So it wanders about subcutaneously, itching, but never being bloodsuckers like the ones that make it to the gut.
Here's the photo again. The locals called it Filaria in Portuguese. Which, looking at Wikipedia, made me think it might be Mansonella streptocerca.
How did a conversation go from Wall Street Journal digress to hook worm?
On second thought, it's quite a natural progression...
why don't they cringe at bare feet in yoga? Why isn't everyone disgusted beyond belief in martial arts classes?
My one MAJOR complaint is the following author's opinion:
"Meanwhile shoe-wearing gym members USUALLY cringe when they see runners go au naterel on public equipment"
As I told her more than a few times........my rough estimate is that 20% of Americans cringe at the site or thought of bare feet, not most. Her opinion is that "gym members usually cringe". I disagree..
Or gymnastics, swimming, diving, Pilates, modern dance, surfing, stand up paddle.......
I overheard a middle aged woman at a FL swimming pool in the early '90's showing off her newfangled water shoes to her friends: "These are the new thing, they're great, this way you can't get AIDS from the swimming pool".
Little did I realize at the time that this fool was a harbinger of things to come.
Surely their weak-a$$ genes are heading for extinction.so many of the older women who do water aerobics at the pool where water shoes, then take them off for shower flip flops, then carefully transfer their feet to socks and shoes.
i have also seen many people carefully wear flip flops right up to the lap lane.
Yah, I don't know if that's always true. The sandy streets in the peri-urban, village-like neighborhood I lived in were pretty clean, and the people there fairly hygienic.Roundworms, hookworms, they're all pretty similar. The thing is, they all come from poor sanitation. Yeah, you can prevent them with shoes, but if you have sanitation problems it's causing a lot of other problems (like diarrhea, cholera, etc.). The solution is decent potty protocol!
Probably depends a lot on how the rest of you is dressed too, no? If you look like a hippy, people might assume (once again, incorrectly) a general lack of hygiene. If you look like a middle-of-the-road, middle-aged, middle-class, somewhat jocky cat like I do, dressed mostly in Target-esque apparel, then they probably just assume eccentricity. That's usually the response I get from my "Minnesota-nice" bourgie neighbors. If you look like Dr. L Board, they probably assume you're a MMA fighter who has escaped from his cage.Agreed. I haven't gone bf at gym, but just out in public, most people's looks show curiosity or amusement; few seem to cringe. And really, are you at the gym to work out or to wonder about how gross you think other people look?
Or gymnastics, swimming, diving, Pilates, modern dance, surfing, stand up paddle.......