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About Baker City herald. (Baker City, Or.) 1990-current | View Entire Issue (June 4, 2020)
10B — THE OBSERVER THuRSday, JunE 4, 2020 COFFEE BREAK Altering wife’s perfect dishes is blasted by sympathetic cook DEAR ABBY: Regarding “Recipe for Disaster in Texas” (Feb. 17), I have to say I dis- agreed with your response. Although Michelin won’t be awarding me any stars, I consider myself a good cook, and I strive to make unique, flavorful meals for my family. My husband frequently feels the need to doctor my recipes, and I think it’s disrespectful of the time and care I took in preparing the meal. He insists on combining ingre- dients that don’t belong together. He puts cheddar cheese on spa- ghetti Bolognese and ranch dressing on chicken teriyaki. He knows this isn’t appropriate, and he would never ask for this modi- fication in a restaurant. “Recipe” should learn to appreciate that his wife is pre- paring meals for him. If he can do better, he can take over the cooking. DEAR — FLAVOR QUEEN OF ABBY NORTH CAROLINA DEAR QUEEN: I enjoyed the responses to that letter about a husband resea- soning his wife’s gourmet meals to her distinct displeasure. Some of the online comments made me chuckle, so I’ll share them, too. Read on: DEAR ABBY: While I was in the military, it was normal to add salt, pepper and ketchup to everything without tasting it first. The habit has followed me for 50 years, no matter where I am. I tell the host that it’s normal for me and to not take it personally. Mac ‘n’ cheese needs ketchup; veggies, potatoes, eggs and watermelon need salt; most everything else needs pepper. For me to taste something, it has to burn my tongue. — VIETNAM VET IN MISSOURI DEAR ABBY: That wife sounds like an oversensitive con- trol freak. Personally, I can’t handle peppers, but I do like lots of cheese and sour cream on my enchiladas. My wife, who does the majority of the cooking, knows my prefer- ence, so she does me the honor of putting more of that on my enchi- ladas. I also like to dip my fries into mayo instead of ketchup, so she obliges. This is what we do for people we love. We don’t threaten, “My way or the highway, Bub!” — G.S. IN ABBYLAND DEAR ABBY: I laughed when I was told to substitute “healthy” plain yogurt for sour cream. It never tasted anything like sour cream to me. Then I got some Greek yogurt and realized it works just as well. (It’s an excel- lent protein source, and many older adults need more as we age.) Now I add plenty without feeling guilty. — ONLINE LOVER DEAR ABBY: My husband jokes that he has Mexican taste buds but a white guy stomach. Thank heavens we have separate bathrooms. — C.K. ON THE NET DEAR ABBY: I know when my husband gets out the Tabasco that the meal is not quite to his liking. I don’t usually mind, because I don’t cook just for him. I cook for the entire family. (And he thinks I’m an amazing cook.) — P.M. ON THE WEB DEAR ABBY: Oh, yes — Tabasco sauce. My dad had so much of it in his lifetime, he should have been McIlhenny’s pitchman. I can see the ad now: Announcer: What do YOU have Tabasco with? Man: I have it with chili! Woman: I have it with eggs! My dad: I have it with a straw. — “ABBDICT” A.C. Monkeys, ferrets offer needed clues in COVID-19 vaccine race By Lauran Neergaard Associated Press The global race for a COVID-19 vaccine boils down to some critical questions: How much must the shots rev up some- one’s immune system to really work? And could revving it the wrong way cause harm? Even as companies recruit tens of thousands of people for larger vaccine studies this summer, behind the scenes scientists still are testing ferrets, monkeys and other animals in hopes of clues to those basic questions — steps that in a pre-pandemic era would have been finished first. “We are in essence doing a great experiment,” said Ralph Baric, a coronavirus expert at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, whose lab is testing several vaccine candidates in animals. The speed-up is necessary to try to stop a virus that has trig- gered a pandemic, killing more than 360,000 worldwide and shut- tering economies. But “there’s no question there is more risk in the current strategy than what has ever been done before,” Baric said. The animal testing lets sci- entists see how the body reacts Photo by VIDO-InterVac at the University of Saskatchewan via AP In this April 2014 photo, a researcher holds a ferret at their facility in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. In 2020, the lab is working with 300 ferrets to develop a COVID-19 vaccine candidate as well as testing oth- er vaccine candidates and therapeutics. to vaccines in ways studies in people never can, said Kate Brod- erick, research chief at Inovio Pharmaceuticals. With animals, “we’re able to perform autopsies and look specif- ically at their lung tissue and get a really deep dive in looking at how their lungs have reacted,” Brod- erick said. She’s awaiting results from mice, ferrets and monkeys that are being exposed to the coronavirus after receiving Inovio’s vaccine. Since no species perfectly mimics human infection, testing a trio broadens the look at safety. And there’s some good news on the safety front as the first animal data from various research teams starts to trickle out. So far, there are no signs of a worrisome side effect called disease enhance- ment, which Dr. Anthony Fauci of the U.S. National Institutes of Health calls reassuring. Enhancement is just what the name implies: Very rarely, a vac- cine doesn’t stimulate the immune system in quite the right way, pro- ducing antibodies that not only can’t fully block infection but that make any resulting disease worse. That first happened in the 1960s with failure of a vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus, RSV, an infection dangerous to young children. More recently, it has complicated efforts at vaccines against mosquito-spread dengue fever. And some attempted vaccines for SARS, a cousin of COVID-19, seemed to cause enhancement in animal testing. Fast forward to the pandemic. Three recently reported studies in monkeys tested different COVID-19 vaccine approaches, including shots made by Oxford University and China’s Sinovac. The studies were small, but none of the monkeys showed evidence of immune-enhanced disease when scientists later dripped the coronavirus directly into the ani- mals’ noses or windpipes. Some of the best evidence so far that a vaccine might work also comes from those monkey studies. Oxford and Sinovac created very different types of COVID-19 vaccines, and in sep- arate studies, each team recently reported that vaccinated monkeys were protected from pneumonia while monkeys given a dummy shot got sick. But protection against severe disease is just a first step. Could a vaccine also stop the virus’s spread? The Oxford study raises some doubt. Those researchers found as much virus lingering in the vac- cinated monkeys’ noses as in the unvaccinated. Even though the experiment exposed moneys to high levels of the coronavirus, it raised troubling questions. The type of vaccine — how it targets the “spike” protein that coats the coronavirus — may make a difference. In monkeys, the new coro- navirus lodges in the lungs but seldom makes them super sick. Ferrets — the preferred animal for flu vaccine development — may help tell if potential COVID-19 vaccines might stop the viral spread. “Ferrets develop a fever. They also cough and sneeze,” infecting each other much like people do, said vaccine researcher Alyson Kelvin of Canada’s Dalhousie University.
