Category: Travel – Health

Dick Proenneke thriving alone in the wilderness of Alaska

Dick Proenneke in “Alone in the Wilderness” is the story of Dick Proenneke living at Twin Lakes in the Alaska wilderness.

Dick retired at age 50 in 1967 and decided to build his own cabin on the shore of Twin Lakes. He filmed his adventures so he could show his relatives in the lower 48 states what life was like in Alaska, building his cabin, hunting for food, and exploring the area.

Bob Swerer has used some of the footage from Dick’s films and created 4 videos about Dick, “Alone in the Wilderness”, “Alone in the Wilderness part 2”, “Alaska, Silence and Solitude” and “The Frozen North”. They can purchase from Bob Swerer Productions at the DickProenneke.com website.

Below are some excepts from these films.

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Are technology-free hotels a trend of the future?

Let’s hope so.

Inside Hook »

According to a 2018 study involving 2,000 U.S. adults, most check their phones an average of 80 times a day, or once every 12 minutes, while on vacation. Some even check their phone more than 300 times each day. A second study conducted in the same year and of the same sample size determined that 43% of U.S. adults find it difficult to completely unplug, specifically from work, while on vacation.

This was, of course, prior to the pandemic, which — thanks to the introduction of apps like Zoom and Slack — exacerbated the issue greatly.

Fast forward to 2022, and “technology-free” is now being pedaled as an amenity across several notable properties, whose guests seek them out because of it. Sheldon Chalet, for example, doesn’t have any TVs, phones — save for the emergency phone system — or wifi on the entire property. That, according to owner and property manager Marne Sheldon, is mostly due to Sheldon Chalet’s location — on a nunatak 10 miles from the summit of Denali in the Don Sheldon Amphitheater inside Alaska’s Denali National Park. In other words: the signal strength isn’t excellent. If anything, Sheldon counts it a selling point. »

WHO Video » Q&A How to protect yourself when travelling during the coronavirus (COVID-2019) outbreak

Dr. Carmen Dolea, Head of the International Health Regulation Secretariat at the World Health Organization (WHO), answers questions about staying safe while travelling. If you are travelling or attending any large public gathering, these are the latest recommendations from the WHO »

https://youtu.be/0KBvReECRrI

 

WHO advice for international traffic in relation to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV with Dr Carmen Dolea, Head, IHR Secretariat at the World Health Organization

So far, the main clinical signs and symptoms reported in this outbreak include fever, difficulty in breathing, and chest radiographs showing bilateral lung infiltrates. As of 27 January 2020, human-to-human transmission has been confirmed largely in Wuhan city, but also some other places in China and internationally. Not enough is known about the epidemiology of 2019-nCoV to draw definitive conclusions about the full clinical features of disease, the intensity of the human-to-human transmission, and the original source of the outbreak.

International travellers: practice usual precautions

Coronaviruses are a large family of respiratory viruses that can cause diseases ranging from the common cold to the Middle-East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). In case of symptoms suggestive of acute respiratory illness before, during or after travel, the travellers are encouraged to seek medical attention and share travel history with their health care provider.

Public health authorities should provide to travellers information to reduce the general risk of acute respiratory infections, via health practitioners, travel health clinics, travel agencies, conveyance operators and at Points of Entry. Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) advice for the public published on the WHO website contains WHO standard recommendations for the general public to reduce exposure to and transmission of a range of illnesses, to protect yourself and others from getting sick, to stay healthy while travelling.

WHO technical guidance on surveillance and case definitions, laboratory guidance, clinical management for suspected novel coronavirus, home care for patients with suspected novel coronavirus, infection prevention and control, risk communications, disease commodity package, and reducing transmission from animals to humans is available on the WHO website.

Travelling for the holidays? Here’s how to not get sick

Michele Cohen Marill, writing for Wired »

The hazard isn’t where you might suspect it is. Mingling in the airport with hordes of travelers—grabbing empty bins in security, touching hand rails on escalators, ordering food at counters, and sitting near the gates—is far riskier than breathing air near someone you hear sneezing or coughing a few rows away.

Airplanes have been designed to pump fresh, filtered air through the cabin ever since the days when smoking was allowed on board. (Otherwise all those planes would have been worse than the smokiest dive bar.) Commercial jets pull in half their cabin air from the high-altitude environment, where it is cold and sterile, while the rest of it is cabin air recirculated through HEPA filters.

Air exchanges occur 10 to 15 times an hour, and the air flows laterally across the row, not from the front of the plane to the rear. Because of the way the air loops, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigates potential infectious transmission on a plane, public health officers generally contact passengers in a zone just two rows in front of and behind the sick passenger.

Read the whole article on Wired »