When my record company rejected 'Full Moon Fever', I was hurt so bad. I was pretty far along in my career at that point. I'd never had anything rejected; I'd never really even had a comment. So when that happened, it was really just a board to the forehead. But then, finally, I picked myself up.

For me, I actually come from an electronic dance music background: house music, electro house, trance music, even. When I was coming out of school, basically, I discovered Brain Fever, Flying Lotus, J Dilla and all that. That was when I got excited about hip-hop and when the Flume project started.

I first got sick after I had my daughter, Kimberly, 21 years ago. I'd always been energetic and never had any serious medical problems. Then I got very sick with a high fever. They told me I had mononucleosis. I became pregnant right away with Sean, and after he was born, I never seemed to recover.

I got the call to play Tony Manero in 'Saturday Night Fever' in Madrid, a role I'd always wanted, as it's such a well-constructed show, and my background is in musical theatre. I'd been travelling back and forth between London and Spain for auditions and had been borrowing money from friends to do it.

Africa needs more funding to continue to fight all of those diseases. We are losing more than 1.3 million young children under the age of five every year because of malaria. We've already lost 25 million people to the pandemic of HIV-AIDS. More people are dying now from typhoid fever. Diabetes is on the rise.

After the scarlet fever and the whooping cough, I remember I started to get mad about it all... I went through the stage of asking myself, 'Wilma, what is this existence all about? Is it about being sick all the time? It can't be.' So I started getting angry about things, fighting back in a new way with a vengeance.

There are environmental threats to health; there are internal threats to health - genetic conditions, viral threats, diseases like cancer and Parkinson's. And then there are societal and global ones, like poverty and lack of nutrition. And unknown viral threats - everything from a new kind of influenza to hemorrhagic fever.

There's only one thing I love more than race day: the morning after! The morning after the Marathon, New York catches running fever. The Hudson River bike path on Manhattan's west side was like a traffic jam of joggers on Monday morning. No doubt the great race fires up the endurance athlete in all of us - and it's beautiful.

When I have supped too heavily of an evening, I drink in the morning a large number of cups of coffee, and that as hot as I can drink it, so that the sweat breaks out on me, and if by so doing I can't restore my body, a whole apothecary's shop couldn't do much, and that is the only thing I have done for years when I have felt a fever.

Some people think that our planet is suffering from a fever. Now scientists are telling us that Mars is experiencing its own planetary warming: Martian warming. This has led some people, not necessarily scientists, to wonder if Mars and Jupiter, non signatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists.

One might say, for example, that a patient has a kind of St Vitus's dance; a kind of dropsy; a kind of nerve fever; a kind of ague. One would never say, however (to end once and for all the confusion of these names) He has St. Vitus's dance, He has nerve fever, He has dropsy, He has ague, since there simply are not any fixed, unchanging diseases to be known by such names.

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