A Flu Strain Goes Kerflooey
First, the good news: As flu seasons go, this one isn't bad -- at least as far as the overall numbers are concerned. This season, 11,000 cases of influenza have been confirmed in the U.S., on a par with the caseload at this time for the past few years. The vaccine, designed to protect against the three flu strains that researchers predicted would cause the most illness this season, seems to be a pretty good match for what ended up being the most common strain. And there's enough vaccine to go around.
Now the not-so-good news: you can never be complacent about a virus as fond of mutating as influenza is. We're always just a few random genetic shifts away from a possible pandemic. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last year documented for the first time that one of the many viral components that make up a common flu strain, known as H1 -- which also happens to be a descendant of the same virus that fueled the pandemic of 1918 -- was resistant to the popular antiviral drug oseltamivir, a.k.a. Tamiflu. In the flu season -- October to May -- of 2007-08, 12% of circulating H1 subtypes were resistant to the drug; this season, 98% of them are. Interestingly, the mutation does not appear to be driven by overuse of the drug. In fact, rates of oseltamivir resistance are higher in nations like Norway where there is little use of the drug, and lowest in countries like Japan where the antiviral is prescribed heavily.
That means that other medications, like zanamivir, a.k.a. Relenza, or prescribing oseltamivir in combination with other drugs is still an option. But the spread of a resistant strain raises the specter of a pandemic -- brought on by a flu virus that is highly contagious and invulnerable to nearly all our medical efforts.
That's why flu experts around the world are keeping their microscopes poised to detect just such mutations. Under the leadership of the World Health Organization (WHO), four flu labs -- in London, Tokyo and Melbourne and at CDC headquarters in Atlanta -- are picking apart flu viruses sent to them throughout the season from doctors treating infected patients. "This is certainly far and away better than the system that existed before, where we weren't doing real-time surveillance to see what was changing, such as resistance," says Nancy Cox, director of the WHO-CDC Collaborating Center for Influenza in Atlanta.
What can we nonexperts do? Get a flu vaccine every year. No shot is 100% effective, but getting vaccinated gives you a good chance of lessening your symptoms -- and thus your infectiousness -- should you get slammed with the oseltamivir-resistant strain. There's also hope that a promising antibody -- which researchers discovered in February -- that binds to a nonmutating part of the virus could one day provide lifetime protection in a single shot against practically all versions of the flu. No more annual flu vaccine and no more worries about the next pandemic. Until then, we just have to hope that the virus doesn't evolve too far ahead of our ability to keep up.
Hard Times Send 'Economoms' Back to the Job Market
When you're eight months pregnant, it's hard to find a good interview suit. But a burgeoning belly didn't stop Nicole Young, 33, from hitting the job circuit this fall. Her husband, who works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, has seen his income shrink along with the Dow. And the consulting projects she has been doing from their home on Long Island in New York are not bringing in enough money to make up the difference. So Young, who left her full-time Marketing job in 2005 when she was pregnant with their first child, buffed up her resume and started conducting phone interviews to try to line up a job that would begin after her second child was born in December. She contacted five recruiters, hoping to find something in corporate communications or general management. Could she start right away? Not exactly. No job offers ensued.
Now, with a 3-month-old and a 3-year-old, Young is reviving her job hunt: full time, part time, any time will do. With the employment outlook turning bleaker by the day, she and many other white collar moms who opted out of the workforce to focus on their kids are scrambling to get back in. Meet the economommies.
Of course, for much of the U.S., working is not optional. But with men making up 82% of the recession's job losses, women are flocking to mom-centric job and career-consulting sites, where they learn how to translate their maternal skills (negotiation, time management) into corporate argot. Mom Corps, a staffing company that pairs women with white collar jobs that have flexible hours, in February surveyed its 500 most recent registrants: 63% said the economy was driving their decision to look for work. Five percent said they joined because their spouse was laid off.
At Mom Corps, businesses pay to list job openings and gain access to tens of thousands of women who have registered for free; the agency, like rival service 10 til 2, also does actual matchmaking for companies. It's definitely a buyer's market. In early March, Mom Corps had 34,000 job hunters and 54 jobs; 10 til 2 reported a similarly scary ratio. How quickly employees are synched with employers -- Mom Corps says most of its openings are filled within two weeks -- hinges on factors like location and skill set. Think Excel is just a verb? Next in line, please.
Since Mom Corps opened shop in 2005, it has matched nearly 1,000 women with manager-level positions at small firms as well as Fortune 500 ones. Though the number of listings fell in recent months, founder Allison O'Kelly says, things are picking up as hiring freezes make project-based, benefits-free workers the only kind companies can afford.
"This is not a good time for many businesses, but this is a good time for our business," says iRelaunch co-founder Carol Fishman Cohen. Her firm, along with sites like YourOnRamp and 2Hats Network, offers crash courses in networking as well as tips on how to finesse gaps in resumes (don't organize Chronologically) and what to wear to an interview (shoulder pads are for linebackers).
One tidbit from Harvard Business School, which held a weeklong course this month geared to help women re-enter the workforce: steer clear of the term part time. Use flexible hours instead. "Part time has a connotation of not full commitment," says Timothy Butler, who chairs the Harvard program, which cost attendees $5,000 apiece. Cheaper options include iRelaunch's $125 one-day return-to-work sessions around the country and its new $19.99 webinars. The first topic: What the heck is LinkedIn, and how can it be used as a job-search tool?
Until recently, business networking sites like LinkedIn were a mystery to Lisa Estabrook, 50, who left her advertising job at a bank in Philadelphia when her first child was born 16 years ago. Now she finds herself haunting YourOnRamp, which her husband -- who was laid off from a reinsurance firm six weeks ago -- heard about from a career counselor at a local church. She rattles off all the networking sites she's trying to get a handle on, including Facebook and Tweeter. Um, make that Twitter. "To my kids," she says, "it's funny to see Mom trying to get with it."
In March, Maria Retter, 48, started a part-time job she found through Mom Corps as an office manager in northern Virginia. With a self-employed husband and with their youngest child about to join two others in college, Retter decided she needed steadier work than the Web-designing she had been doing from home. And she is firmly convinced that motherhood has made her a better employee: "If you can handle temper tantrums, then when you have to deal with obnoxious people in an office setting, you say to yourself, 'You remind me of my 2-year-old.'"
Whole Lotta Love
If the term world music gives you hives -- and its condescension to musicians (lumping all non-Westerners into a single undifferentiated category) and consumers (writing off anyone who doesn't listen to it as implicitly narrow-minded) is really quite impressive -- then grab an EpiPen before reading any further. For we are about to discuss Amadou and Mariam, the world-music stars who are not just a married, middle-aged couple from Mali but a blind, married, middle-aged couple from Mali. By description, they're worthier than the Grameen Bank.
The blind thing is certainly played for effect -- just not the effect you might anticipate. Almost since their first meeting, in 1976 as students at Bamako's Institute for Young Blind People, Amadou and Mariam have billed themselves as the Blind Couple of Mali, and if the lack of an exclamation point reads as restraint, factor in that they often perform in diamond-studded sunglasses. Faced with a world that tends to view blindness and African-ness in tragic terms, Amadou Bagayoko (he plays a killer guitar) and Mariam Doumbia (she sings like an adoring aunt) go out of their way to assert that things are pretty great with them, thanks.
To understand just how great, listen to the pair's fifth album, Welcome to Mali, out March 24. Following up on their 2005 breakthrough, Dimanche a Bamako, which was produced by France-raised Spaniard Manu Chao and topped critics' lists worldwide, Amadou and Mariam recruited another international rock star, Brit Damon Albarn, for a cameo. What Albarn brings is an opener, "Sabali," so light and giddy that no translation is required to get that Mariam is whisper-singing about love. The swirling keyboards and gradually rising dance beat are pure '80s pop, sweeter than cheap champagne -- but with soul; it's like a Cyndi Lauper tune sung by Vera Hall.
From there, Welcome to Mali becomes a more standard Amadou and Mariam affair, which is to say it's a joyous, hook-filled guitar album with impressive range. Amadou grew up as the biggest Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple fan in Bamako, and while he knows how to mimic the sounds of a kora and slip into high-stepping township jive, he's most at home using African styles to flavor rock melodies. "Ce N'Est Pas Bon" is stomping garage rock, while "Bozos" could be a particularly happy Neil Young song. Everything has a familiar pop structure, but there's just enough African instrumentation to provide a thrilling sense of dislocation.
Amadou and Mariam's lyrics tend toward uncontroversial declarations like "Hypocrisy in politics, it's not good/ We don't want any." (It's possible the lyric sheet was simplified in the translation from Bambara and French; it's also possible they're just casual lyricists.) The exception, linguistically, is "I Follow You," sung by Amadou to his wife in tender, halting English: "Under the sun, baby, I follow you/ Under the ground, baby, I follow you." As Amadou told a British music magazine, "We would like English-speaking people to understand us. It's not a large vocabulary, but our heart is in it."
"If a textbook is rendered unrentable, depending on where it is in its life cycle, we might charge the student for overuse," Safka said. "But 95% of our books come back just fine."
If you want to keep the book but can't afford the new-book price, you can always buy used.
In addition to the campus bookstore, there are at least half a dozen websites that sell used books in good condition, including Alibris, TextbooksRus, AbeBooks and Biblio. You can search each of these sites individually, or you can go to www.bigwords.com, which offers one-stop shopping.
In this case, the best price for a lightly used U.S. edition of this calculus book was $122. (An international edition was available for less, but the site warned that the numbers were metric and would not be comparable.)
The one option Allen warned students against buying was e-book versions of texts. A number of publishers offer online books for purchase, she noted, but they are actually one-year rentals. By and large, the e-books are available only through an Internet connection, and many restrict the number of pages you can print at one time.