Category Archives: Centers for Disease Control

Hot Air

Fable Folderol

Add this myth to the ever-expanding list of commonly-held falsehoods: the holidays are a significant cause of suicides.

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George Bailey, Preparing To Jump

Yep, you guessed it. It ain’t true at all. It’s so untrue that, in fact, the exact opposite can be argued — the holidays prevent people from committing suicide. That’s what figures from the Centers for Disease control indicate. The CDC tells us fewer suicides occur in November and December than any other time of the year.

So flush this one down the toilet along with the full moon causing mayhem and people using only 10 percent of their brains.

Food Folderol

I’ve patronized Chipotle ever since I arrived in Bloomington mainly because the place serves the kind of ginormous burritos I’d become accustomed to in my Chicago days. Back in my beloved hometown, there’d be burrito joints and taquerias seemingly on every corner. There was even a place that advertised “Burritos As Big As Your Head.”

The truth is if you can find a burrito as big as my coconut, you’ll enjoy an extraordinarily filling repast indeed. Perhaps two.

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La Bamba Burritos

Anyway, Chipotle has been the source of a number of foodborne illness outbreaks in the last calendar year.

You might say the company has been the victim of bad luck. There’s a dizzying variety of ways colonies of bacteria can grow in foods at restaurants and grocery stores. From preparers who neglect to wash their hands after using the bathroom to servers who violate time-temperature guidelines, the food you eat could, at any moment, pack a wallop of microorganisms on your forkful that’ll have you hugging the white bowl for days at a time. In fact, pretty much every single forkful of food you shove into your mouth contains scads of sickening germs. Your body’s natural defense system usually takes care of all the invaders entering your gullet. That is, unless the sheer number of microorganisms overwhelms your defenders.

That’s what happened to hundreds of people, Chipotle diners all, on five separate occasions in 2015. Once is a simple occurrence, twice a coincidence, five times a pattern. Chipotle foodborne illness outbreaks this year have affected poor souls in at least 10 states. The causes of these mass horkings have included E. coli, salmonella, and norovirus, three unrelated invaders, indicating the fast food operation has a big problem on its hands.

Chipotle, of course, crows about its local food sourcing and all-natural ingredients. Well, everybody does, but Chipotle was on it early and big, the first national corporate entity to jump on that bandwagon. Chipotle’s “mission statement” (ugh, I detest corporate-speak) claims it offers “Food with Integrity.” (Double-ugh, I detest — almost as much — profit-making under the guise of altruism.)

McDonald’s Corp. was a big investor in Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. from 1998 through 2006, a period of time during which C. grew from a modest-sized Colorado chain to a 500-location coast-to-coast juggernaut. It’s ironic, natch, that a McDonald’s-owned outfit would succeed based on an appeal to the “natural” palate. Mickey D’s “food” is about as natural as that bottle of soap scum remover under your bathroom sink.

A secret: I still, on rare occasions, indulge in a Big Mac. Sue me.

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Guilty

Somehow, Chipotle overcame the negative image of its corporate overlord and actually became known as a crunchy, New Age-y, safe place to eat. College students went gaga over the place. They could eat fast crap while convincing themselves they were still protecting their holy temple bodies. Chipotle told  customers its food was free from GMOs and other weapons of mass destruction.

Yet, five times in the last year Chipotle’s food has caused hundreds of folk to invert their maws. Yuck.

Now comes Henry I. Miller, bio-researcher, former food and drug regulator, and a Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, to say Chipotle’s problems with foodborne illness are a result of its natural, crunchy, New Age-y practices. Miller says locally-produced food is not safer, “pesticide-free” crops actually are rife with potentially dangerous bug-killing substances, organic grains often are tainted by toxins and parasites, and using natural fertilizer — read: animal shit — increases the odds of foodborne illness eightfold.

And it’s not that Chipotle and the like would argue with Miller. Here’s a line from Chipotle’s 2014 annual report (p. 14):

We may be a higher risk for foodborne illness outbreaks than some competitors due to our use of fresh produce and meats rather than frozen and our reliance on employees cooking with traditional methods rather than automation.

In other words, our methods suck — and are dangerous, to boot.

If you spend your time gathering your food info from profit-driven media or, worse, “natural” websites, you’ll become convinced there are only two types of food in this world:

  1. Magic food that’ll make you healthier, stronger, happier, more orgasmic, and will help you live to the ripe old age of 152.
  2. Evil food that’ll cause cancer, heart disease, obesity, rashes, shingles, warts, poverty, pollution, crime, slavery, and Donald Trump’s hair.

In our ultimately unfulfillable quest to live forever, we’ve latched onto food as the magic pill in recent years. Now, not only is it unwise to ingest Drano, cyanide, nail polish remover, and gasoline, it’s considered almost as rash to eat a slice of bread or enjoy a cob of genetically modified corn. Conversely, if we only buy squash from the organic farmer down the road, we’ll live long enough to see humankind populate Mars.

Here’s a truism from an inveterate talker: People talk too much.

Miller concludes:

Although the crops, meats and other foods produced by modern conventional agricultural technologies may not bring to mind a sentimental Norman Rockwell painting, they are on average safer than food that reflects pandering to current fads.

In the words of my favorite cook ever, Chico of Club Lago, shut up and eat.

[Gasp] He’s Naked!

Okay, ready for Evidence Item #33 gazillion that we, the species Homo Sapiens sapiens, are flat-out psychopathic? Here goes.

Some poor schmuck tried to wade through the shallow waters of the Mediterranean Sea the other day in an attempt to get around the barbed wire fence that separates Egypt from the Gaza Strip. He was a Palestinian and he wanted to get out of that god-foresaken apartheid hell and perhaps breathe the relatively freer air of its neighbor to the south (emphasis on relatively).

Egyptian border guards opened fire on him, dropping him like a sack of flour in the surf, errant rifle rounds plucking the waters around him and raising little up-splashes. Huzzah, the sovereign state of Egypt had been protected.

The whole incident was caught on video. The Arabic version of Al Jazeera aired the vid and tut-tutted the tragedy. Only the Palestinian guy had been stark naked as he splashed through the surf, perhaps as a way of showing he wasn’t carrying any arms or weapons of mass hysteria into that ancient land. So, even though we see in loving detail a man’s life being snuffed out in a hail of bullets, Al Jazeera producers protected their viewers from seeing the poor bastard’s cold-turtled junk as well as his bare buttocks by pixellating these horrifying locales.

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Praise Allah — We Can’t See His Penis

Yes, the Earth, where terrestrial evolution’s highest form is more scared of nudity than bloody homicide.

 

 

Hot Air

We’re all gonna die!

Like the headline sez, but it ain’t gonna be ebola that gets us.

This is not West Africa. We’re turning ourselves inside out over the fact that one guy has died (and he was recently arrived from West Africa.) Now two other people have it.

The populace of this holy land is having conniption fits over this non-epidemic, thanks mainly to a corporate media whose most precious talent is the ability to scare the poo out of us. They’re doing so.

Anyway, let’s turn to a little science. Have you caught this piece in the Washington Post?

From WaPo

Click Image For Full Story

Each of the grid charts illustrates how a specific disease spreads and kills (if at all). Ebola may be a killer but it ain’t a spreader. At least not a fast one. It simply does not jump from body to body easily.

An alert medical system and educated populace can stem the disease relatively quickly.

So, no, Centers for Disease Control head Dr. Thomas Frieden does not need to resign, despite the demands he do so by that noted epidemiologist Bill O’Reilly and the learned experts at breitbart.com. See, Frieden does not think ebola is gonna kill us all, nor does he want to seal our borders against the even more terrifying and dangerous natives of Africa.

Almost as perilous is what fear of ebola is turning us into. Andy Borowitz of The New Yorker states the case clearly and firmly (satire alert, natch):

From The New Yorker

You Know The Drill — Click For Full Story

And, of course, since we live in a nation awash in grievances, some among us consider themselves victims even though they haven’t got a fever. For instance, I know a nurse who is loudly proclaiming on the interwebs that nurses, as always, take the blame for everything. She’s referring to suggestions that the nurse who caught ebola from the Liberian man in Dallas may have employed faulty personal protection practices while caring for him.

The idea being, she might have touched her eyelid or mouth with a contaminated glove finger, a simple mistake that any human can make. But, naturally, chronically aggrieved parties interpret any criticism as the moral equivalent of slavery.

Post

Nah, Don’t Click The Image

This is the first time I’ve ever heard that nurses are being blamed for anything. They, like teachers, are the Virgin Marys of our society, above reproach, free of sin, spotless vessels. Now, suddenly, they’re the fall guys for everything?

We Americans are weird.

Big City Blues

The Herald Times reports this morning (paywall) that Monroe County is going full steam ahead with plans for a 220-spot parking garage next to the Zietlow Justice Center and jail. Only “The full cost of the project is not known.” and “A construction date has not been set.”

So scotch the full and the steam. The ahead while you’re at it, too.

All I know is the county and the city had better get cracking on throwing up some parking garages quickly, what with hotels springing up everywhere near the formerly quaint Courthouse Square. Hell, no fewer than three developments are in the planning stages for the intersection of Lincoln and Kirkwood avenues alone. And another is planned for the bank property at Washington and Kirkwood.

Hong Kong

Bloomington’s Future?

It’ll be easier to catch ebola in Bloomington than find a parking space once all these structures go up. To steal and mangle a line from Jerry Seinfeld, They’re gonna be building hotels inside of hotels soon.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion. Let’s build a nice round number of parking facilities spaced out to ring the downtown area. Say six of them. The existing parking facilities — on 4th Street, on Walnut and 7th, and behind the Buskirk Chumley Theater will give us a total of nine. (Let’s leave the Monroe County Municipal Library lot for library patrons, shall we?) Eliminate street parking for a two or three block radius around the Square, maybe more. Contract with a private company to run regular trolley service between all the lots, the Courthouse, the Zietlow facility, the hotels, the library, the Buskirk Chumley, the Sample Gates, City Hall, and whatever other attractions and municipal service centers there are in the vicinity.

Trolley

Catch The Trolley

How do we pay for it all? Slap a room tax on all the new hotels going up. Add a food and beverage tax to all appropriate places within the service area. Hell, a five-dollar surcharge on a hotel room isn’t going to kill anybody. And adding 50 cents to a dollar to everybody’s grub and booze tab isn’t going to stop people from stuffing their faces and getting sloshed.

If Bloomington wants to pretend it’s a big city, it’s going to have to act like one.

The Haircuts Of Kim Jong-Un

As a public service, I’m providing a photographic timeline of the North Korean Dear Leader’s coifs. Historians and researchers will benefit greatly from this.

KJU 1

A Very Young KJU With His Daddy-o, KJI

KJU 2

KJU Adopts The Adolph Look

KJU 3

KJU Opts For The Collegiate Crew Cut

KJU 4

KJU Shaves The Sides

KJU 5

KJU Ditches The Part

KJU 6

KGU Sprouts Speed Racer Villain Horns

KJU 7

KJU’s Pompadour/Fade Begins To Attain Towering Heights

You’re welcome

Hot Air

Panic

Is it my imagination?

Scads of folk are howling about ebola these days, natch. The howlers, generally, seem to think we’re not doing enough to protect ourselves from the scourge.

Ourselves being the citizens of this holy land.

In fact, I recall a number of interwebs yowls wherein the complainants were aghast that we should let that missionary doctor who’d contracted the disease back into the country.

Brantly

Dr. Kent Brantly, Ebola Survivor

[The Guardian photo]

A country, I might add, that is pretty much alone among the world’s nations in having the facilities, the technology, and the dough to handle victims of ebola. Where the yowlers wanted the poor doctor to go was never explained.

Now I understand a lot of Dallas parents are keeping their kids home from school lest their snowflakes become infected. This despite health officials’ repeated assurances that there is no danger their kids’ll catch ebola.

Dallas is where the nation’s first diagnosed ebola case was discovered. A newly-arrived Liberian was diagnosed with it within the last week. It’s said the Liberian came into contact with up to 18 people between the time of his arrival here (September 20th) and his isolation. Any Dallas school kids he might have come in contact with have been removed from school and are being monitored.

The Centers for Disease Control and every other reputable medical and epidemiological expert tell us ebola can only be spread through direct contact with an infected person’s sweat, urine, feces, saliva, or other bodily fluids. In other words, you have to come into fairly intimate contact with an ebola patient before the disease grabs you.

Still, prudence is the best course and ebola can kill you almost as quickly as a self-appointed, self-aggrandizing neighborhood watch stalker with a gun, so those stricken with the virus must be isolated.

We’ve also learned that an ebola patient is only contagious when s/he is exhibiting symptoms. That’s why the number of people the Liberian has been in contact with is sketchy. It’s not known to the minute when he became symptomatic and when he had contact with each of the individuals.

All that said, people wanting to keep their kids home from school is over the top.

Rather like the reaction when, say, Ryan White wanted to keep going to school even after he was diagnosed with AIDS.

Another disease, I might add, that is only contagious via bodily fluids, specifically blood, semen, breast milk, and vaginal and rectal fluids.

No one can forget how panicky so many were over AIDS. Panic being the key word.

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Note the qualifier, “hysterical or irrational behavior.”

I don’t recall much panic over, say, a few strains of seasonal flu that were particularly virulent in recent years. The flu, acc’d’g to the CDC, kills anywhere from 3000 to 49,000 people each year, depending on the strain. Forty-nine thousand people! Man, only 33,561 people were killed in automobile accidents in 2012, the last year for which the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has released data. And we bay like coyotes about traffic safety and passenger protection.

Auto Crash

Not As Bad As The Flu

The flu, on an annual basis, is more deadly than car crashes.

People don’t keep their kids home from school during flu season, though. Nor, for that matter, do they do so because their kids must be transported to school via motor vehicles.

Yet a number of Dallas parents are keeping their kids home for fear of ebola. Panicky fear.

Is it because ebola thus far is known as a disease of the other? Just as AIDS once was? The other could be Africans or simply dark people in general or it could be homosexuals.

Flu can kill you. Riding in a car can kill you. No one’s panicking over the flu or riding in a car. What makes ebola and AIDS different? Their association with the other?

Or is this all in my imagination. Nah.

Other Voices, Other Screeches

You thought I was red-assed over the NFL’s recent domestic violence scandals and subsequent cover-ups? You’d better get over to Tom Phelps’ new blog, Random Musings from an Implacable Optimist.

RMFAIO

Click Image

Not only is Phelps, of Ellettsville, teed off, he’s got some solutions for the NFL to consider if it’d like to get itself back in the good graces of civilized society (a desire on the league’s part I tend to doubt exists.)

In any case, TP’s new screech outlet looks promising. Really promising. I’m going to read it daily — or however often he will post — and I recommend you do too.

Only after you’ve read my screeches.

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