If you're still making summer vacation plans, still looking for a place to rest mind, body and soul, here's a list of the top five places not to visit, courtesy of The Blacksmith Institute, an international think tank that identifies and monitors the most polluted sites on the planet:

1. Sumqayit, Azerbaijan. A city of 275,000 and once the Soviet Union's center of chemical production, Sumqayit contains lots of heavy metal, oil and chemical contamination, and a local cancer rate that's 22 percent to 51 percent higher than the surrounding region.

2. Chernobyl, Ukraine. Site of the world's worst nuclear power accident in 1986 and now pretty much a dead zone — at least for humans.

3. Dzerzhinsk, Russia. Another Cold War chemical manufacturing center with one of the lowest life expectancy rates in the world (just 45 years). A decades-long practice of injecting chemical waste directly into the ground is blamed.

4. Kabwe, Zambia. The country's second largest city was also home to one of the world's largest lead smelters until 1994. The lasting legacy: The entire city is awash with heavy metal poisons, known to cause brain and nerve damage in children and fetuses.

5. La Oroya, Peru. This is a small city, just 35,000 residents, but it's a big place for mining, with extensive American-run operations for lead, copper and zinc.

BODY OF KNOWLEDGE

The human head contains 22 bones.

GET ME THAT. STAT!

It's true, higher gas prices mean fewer traffic fatalities. A study by researchers at the University of Alabama found every 10 percent rise in gas prices reduces car accident deaths by 2.3 percent, with the effect most strongly seen in teen drivers. The researchers estimated that if gas remained at $4 a gallon or higher for a year or more, traffic deaths could drop nationwide by more than 1,000 per month.

NEVER SAY DIET

The world's speed-eating record for sweet corn is 34.75 ears in 12 minutes, held by "Crazy Legs Conti."

MEDTRONICA

Hardin MD

www.lib.uiowa.edu/hardin/md

The Hardin Library for the Health Sciences at the University of Iowa maintains this general health reference site. What makes this site notable is the eye-opening (if sometimes stomach-churning) gallery of medical pictures.

STORIES FOR THE WAITING ROOM

If you've ever visited a hospital or emergency room, you know that every ache, pain and injury has its own ICD code, or International Classification of Diseases number. The ICD is used for billing purposes and to track public health trends. You can think of it as a kind of bar code for human misery.

No human condition is excluded — on this planet and elsewhere. For example, the ICD even includes a code if you're accidentally injured while on a spacecraft: It's ICD-E845.0.

But if you happen to be weightless at the time of injury, that's E928.0.

PHOBIA OF THE WEEK

Amathophobia — fear of dust

BEST MEDICINE

A man had just gotten his first hearing aid and was raving to a friend about it: "It's fantastic. I don't have any trouble hearing things at home now, and outside I hear sounds I haven't heard in years. I just can't believe what I've been missing. This aid has opened up a whole new world for me!"

"What kind is it?" asked his friend.

"Three-thirty."

OBSERVATION

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe $10 million dollars in medical bills, but you work hard for 35 years and you pay it back and then — one day — you have a massive stroke; your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk. And then — one day — you step off a curb at 67th Street, and bang you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

— Actor and comedian Denis Leary

LAST WORDS

Cut 'er loose, Doc!

— American Western artist Frederic Remington (1861-1909), to his surgeon just before an emergency appendectomy

To find out more about Scott Lafee and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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