Corrigan: "It is not true, however, that the polio vaccine or any other vaccine was ever tested on millions of people before it was approved." The clinical study for Salk's vaccine alone had 440,000 children given the vaccine, 210,000 given a placebo, and 1.2 million in the control group. Koprowski's large-scale field trials involved over 7 million children in poland. If you count the Soviet Union's immunization campaign, whose results they studied and which helped confirm the validity of it to the rest of the world, Sabin's vaccine's "trials" involved tens of millions. http://www.polio.info/polio-eradication/front/templates/index.jsp?siteCode=POLIO&codeRubrique=34&lang=EN Yet, Salk's was but one vaccine. What I said was indeed accurate. There were millions involved in the clinical trials of polio vaccines. You're right that vaccines *usually* don't have such a large test size, but polio was an exception. "As far as the viral cause of polio, well, yes, but what triggers the paralysis? Polio was endemic before the introduction of the vaccine. Everyone was infected by early childhood. And yet poliomyelitis was rare before the modern age." That's because the virus is transmitted through the fecal-oral route -- with a twist. Like how chicken pox is less virulent the younger you are infected, the same is true with polio. The oldest clear reference to poliomyelitis is in a 3,000 year old Egyptian stele. Historically, due to poor sanitation (which led to outbreaks of many diseases, like cholera), almost every infant would be exposed with poliovirus. If it was symptomatic, they simply died, without the cause ever being revealed. If it wasn't symptomatic, they were immune for the rest of their life. However when, to combat various other plagues, modern sanitation began to be used (so fecal waste wasn't dumped into the same water that people would drink), people weren't exposed to polio as infants. When they were exposed at older ages, then the problems arose. Those with the best health situations tended to be struck the worst; it became a disease of the affluent. Which is probably why so much money was poured into curing it, unlike, say, malaria (which still kills millions). :P There's absolutely no evidence that the rate of poliomyelitis compared to the rate of poliovirus infection in adults has ever changed significantly. As for the pesticide hypothesis, that particularly doesn't stand up to scrutiny. DDT wasn't even invented until '39, but the US had huge polio outbreaks before then. Remember FDR? :) H.L. Menken wrote about polio outbreaks happening virtually every summer in Baltimore in the late 1800s. It's illogical, too. Poliovirus progressing into poliomyelitis involves how readily the virus passes the brain-blood barrier. While chemicals that pass the brain-blood barrier are few, even fewer are the chemicals which alter how well *other* things pass through the barrier.

Oh, Kippy! You are SO generous! Thank you (NOT)! LOL! You're very welcome to collect the ones which have grown since the last rain several months ago from just down from the house here. They should make marvelous holiday decorations with sufficient gold spray paint! I'm glad you're more relaxed, Ingrid. I know the feeling, except for watching for the little green shoots starting to creep from under the soil... If you have that nasty invader in the shadier areas of your garden, that means there is water there. It grows where there is water, from Mexico to Canada. It CAN be eradicated,but it does demand herbicides. If you dig the tubers and leave them in the direct sun, they shrivel and die (vampires!), and I have done that with literally several hundred over the years. I've unearthed quite a few the size of a V-8 American automobile engine and they shriveled and dried up once exposed to the elements. Others have been "dispatched" with buckets of "the devil's brew" herbicide we won't mention, with the tendrils wrapped around inside them so they sucked it up like wicks. It didn't take long and they NEVER reemerged! Kim

Check out the Polly White Peach. It was developed in Iowa and is hardy to -20F. We live 5 miles north of St Paul, MN, and last June I planted one. It was a second year container tree that almost doubled in size over the summer after planting. (from 4 to 7 feet) I watered it until Oct, and put a white plastic cover over the trunk. I also planted it near our driveway so I could easily shovel snow around the base for some extra insulation. (we never use salt on our drive) Our winter was so incredibly mild, and the temp never went below -9F in our area. This spring, the tree is looking fantastic! The trunk looks good, zero dieback, and it easily has 40 to 50 flower buds. I've decided to take full advantage of this...if fruit develops, I will let the tree fully fruit, and only thin to prevent branch breakage. Who knows when we'll get another mild winter like this last one. I'm hoping for some good peaches.

Y'all, I was so excited that it was going to rain....and it did rain, but only 2/10s of an inch! We had so much thunder and such dark skies, but this storm was mostly "all blow, and no go" for us, as my dad used to say. Bessie, I figured if we were getting too dry here, y'all were probably getting too dry over there too. What a change from a month ago! G. M., It is strange how y'all always get so much more rain than we do, and we're only 1 county away from one another! Several days while you were gone to the lake, we had little afternoon showers pop up in Marietta and they had a pretty good rain, but we were left out/passed over out here in the county. I can remember some cool August weather too quite a ways back. Almost every August since we moved here, though, the weather has been brutal during the first 2 weeks of the month. Our first year here, my brother and sister-in-law and their 2 kids came (from Pennsylvania) to visit and Ardmore was the hottest place in the country for several of the August days that they were here....with temps in the 108 to 113 range. They have been back to visit since then.....but only during the winter months. :) It is only 88 degrees here right now.....on this date last year, we had a high temp of 101. I'll take 88 over 101 any day. I was watching the news from Minneapolis-St. Paul earlier. Last night, watching it in real time, took me back to 2002 and Webbers Falls. I really feel for the people in Minnesota--what a shock to have a major bridge collapse! Dawn