Get Your Kid a Kitty!

Went down to Ana's Estalagem, to pick up a gorgeous old door and two chairs she's given us. On her garden wall, one of the many cats she feeds - in three different locations - because she feels sorry for them. You get yourself a full-time (and expensive) job if you start feeling sorry for animals here...

Gratefuls:
- meeting our mate, Zé Maria, who has ordered us to meet him in one of the bars that are still open, to celebrate St Martin's day, when the new wine is tasted, with roast chestnuts - so we'll go in a bit
- our social life suddenly taking off again, it seems
- good FT conversations with son, Paul, and daughter, Julia, who has gone back to work, delivering babies - as one of her colleagues said, she's a tough 'un

The Body, ch 13, Deep Breath: The Lungs and Breathing, p252-257
Having suffered a fair bit with asthma myself and a grandfather who reputedly committed suicide because of it, found this section especially interesting...
He begins with saying how the French novelist, Marcel Proust, was a slave to asthma... In Proust's day, asthma was a rare disease and not well understood. Today it is common and still not understood... 
The highest rate in the world is in the UK, where 30 percent of children have shown asthma symptoms in the past year... All the English-speaking nations of the world have high rates, as do those of Latin America... 
Neil Pearce, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine... 'All we can really say about asthma is that it is primarily a Western disease... There is something about having a Western lifestyle that sets up your immune system in a way that makes you more susceptible. We don't really understand why.'
... Some years ago, Pearce made a curious discovery - that people who had had a cat early in life seemed to derive lifelong protection from getting asthma. 'I like to joke that I've studied asthma for thirty years and I have never prevented a single case, but I have saved the lives of a lot of cats,' he says.