The INFLU is like any of the others masks the paranoid public is wearing to combat H1N1, except that it's not for total pussies:

Plan your sickness, develop antibodies for the flu and strengthen your immune system the natural way. The INFLU flu collector mask increases the prospect of getting the Swine flu (H1N1) as well as the regular seasonal flu with several hundred percent.

Your planned immunity comes by way of a battery-powered fan, which "increases the intake of viruses in ambient air through the respiratory system."

There is no flaw with this: the plan, or the joke. [INFLU via Nerdcore via Neatorama]

This is the exact opposite of Netflix discs, which are actually quite clean, comparatively speaking.

You see, those red sleeves and the delectable range of DVDs they contain are relatively free of any funky viruses or deadly bacteria, this according to an interesting slow news day report out of KLTV 7 East Texas.

As part of the report, six Netflix discs and sleeves were sent to an infectious disease expert at the University of Texas for a good swabbing. After some time in the incubator, the petri dishes were removed, and the samples—thankfully for this Netflix user—were no more covered with bacteria than a sample would have been had the good doctor touched them with his bare hand:

"They were fairly clean," said [Dr. Richard] Wallace [in an interview with KLTV]. "If I took my fingers and laid them on the top of the plates, this is what you'd grow." As for the disks themselves, Wallace said he found nothing that could potentially cause disease.

So keep on using that copy of Benjamin Button as a coaster. You'll be relatively safe in doing so—just don't eat off of it. [KLTV East Texas via Hacking Netflix]

The shoes, developed jointly by Aetrex and GTX, should be available by the end of the year. And if you're wondering about the very non-Giz, non-snarky tone of this post, it's dialed down a bit because now that John McCain is no longer in the limelight, I can't think of a single unoffensive Alzheimer's joke to make. You see, when you're implying a person of political power is senile, it's satire, not snark. [ABC]

The first instance comes from a 12-year-old Swiss girl who had sores on her hand from playing way too much. The doctor first thought she had "idiopathic eccrine hidradenitis", a condition that affects both the hands and feet. After 10 days of laying off the sticks, she was fine and her doctors got to name a new disease.

We expect the Wii will get its own disorder some time in late 2009 or early 2010. [BBC via Kotaku]

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Blood analysis usually requires either large and expensive equipment or a trained technician to manually examine the material. Both are out of reach for many remote areas, especially in parts of Africa where HIV and malaria are rampant. UCLA researcher Dr. Aydogan Ozcan developed software that allows blood samples to be analyzed with the use of inexpensive, off-the-shelf camera sensors and a filtered light source. The key is the software's ability to analyze thousands of blood cells at once, providing an accurate result within minutes.

The photo above shows a Sony-Ericsson phone modded for this type of use. That bulge on the back is the filtered light source. It's great to see cool mods done for great social welfare rather than our gadgety amusement every once in awhile. [Wired]

1. Athlete's Foot
2. Polio
3. Feline Senior Dementia
4. the Bends
5. Priapism
6. the Vapors
7. Seasonal Affective Disorder
8. the Bubonic Plague

So things really aren't so bad. [CTV]

Most recently, HealthMap detected the salmonella outbreak in the U.S., which has sickened over 1,000 people, long before the Center for Disease Control announced that it was happening. By alerting officials and doctors to the most likely diseases in their area, the web tool could help make health care much more efficient and precise. [Discovery]

While a 90% recognition rate is 10% from perfect, such tests could become excellent prescreening methods, especially as the functional database grows to identify more and rarer conditions. This is why...er...my friend refuses to get cosmetic surgery. One day doctors will scan...his...face and have a solid argument on why he still wets the bed and needs to sleep with choochoo blankets. And just think of the efficient future when compact cameras use smile detectors that spot autism. [scotsman via spluch]