Most of us can’t do anything about the horrible stuff that’s happening in the world right now. But when the news is intolerable, we don’t have to immerse ourselves in it first thing in the morning.

A few days ago, the World Health Organization caused a stir by saying that antibody tests may not indicate whether someone is immune from SARS-CoV-2. This led to some understandable confusion, and WHO spokespeople have subsequently walked the comments back a bit. While the messaging might’ve been handled better, the public health experts at the WHO were trying to make a very important point.

Several prominent politicians have advanced the idea of issuing “immunity passports” to people who’ve recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection. The concept is that these people could safely return to work because they will have acquired immunity to the virus, so they won’t be at risk of developing COVID-19 again or reinfecting others. What the WHO was trying to say – correctly – is that while antibody testing has an important function in the response to the pandemic, immunity passports are a horrible idea. Yes, they were a major plot point in Contagion, but that was a movie. Reality doesn’t work that way.

A new paper in the journal CHEST presents the case of a toddler who went into respiratory distress after receiving a smear of Vicks VapoRub under her nose. To figure out what happened, the researchers replicated the treatment in ferrets, whose respiratory systems are a good model for humans. The results were not exactly consistent with the Vicks “Breathe free” slogan:

[VapoRub] stimulates mucin secretion and [mucociliary transport] in the … inflamed ferret airway. This set of findings is similar to the acute inflammatory stimulation observed with exposure to irritants, and may lead to mucus obstruction of small airways and increased nasal resistance.