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.