Central Asia

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Details: Written by: Richard_McKie; Parent Category: Travel; Category: Central Asia; Published: 28 July 2019; Hits: 51384

Having, in several trips, followed the Silk Road from Xian and Urumqi in China across Tajikistan and Uzbekistan our next visit had to be to the Caucuses. So in May 2019 we purchased an organised tour to Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia from ExPat Explore. If this is all that interests you you might want to skip straight to Azerbaijan. Click here...

Details: Written by: Richard_McKie; Parent Category: Travel; Category: Central Asia; Published: 10 August 2018; Hits: 98756

Travels in Central Asia

In June 2018 we travelled to China before joining an organised tour in Central Asia that, except for a sojourn in the mountains of Tajikistan, followed in the footsteps of Marco Polo along the Great Silk Road.

Travel

Cruising to PNG

On the 17th February 2020 Wendy and I set sail on Queen Elizabeth on a two week cruise up to Papua New Guinea, returning to Sydney on 2nd March.

Fiction, Recollections & News

The Craft

Introduction:

The Craft is an e-novella about Witchcraft in a future setting. It's a prequel to my dystopian novella: The Cloud: set in the last half of the 21st century - after The Great Famine.

Since writing this I have added a preface, concerning witchcraft, that you can read here...

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Opinions and Philosophy

The race for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine

As we all now know (unless we've been living under a rock) the only way of defeating a pandemic is to achieve 'herd immunity' for the community at large; while strictly quarantining the most vulnerable.

Herd immunity can be achieved by most people in a community catching a virus and suffering the consequences or by vaccination.

It's over two centuries since Edward Jenner used cowpox to 'vaccinate' (from 'vacca' - Latin for cow) against smallpox. Since then medical science has been developing ways to pre-warn our immune systems of potentially harmful viruses using 'vaccines'.

In the last fifty years herd immunity has successfully been achieved against many viruses using vaccination and the race is on to achieve the same against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19).

Developing; manufacturing; and distributing a vaccine is at the leading edge of our scientific capabilities and knowledge and is a highly skilled; technologically advanced; and expensive undertaking. Yet the rewards are potentially great, when the economic and societal consequences of the current pandemic are dire and governments around the world are desperate for a solution.

So elite researchers on every continent have joined the race with 51 vaccines now in clinical trials on humans and at least 75 in preclinical trials on animals.

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