Or
Obvious Things That I Didn’t Have to Learn from the Internet.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/15/asia/mongolia-plague-death-scli-intl/index.html
This is a July 15th story from CNN Asia reporting that a 15-year-old Mongolian boy died of bubonic plague after eating a dinner of marmot, “a local delicacy.”
It is also reported that in 2019, “a couple in Mongolia died after eating a raw marmot kidney.” I should hope so.
A tip for travelers: wherever rodents, or their parts – cooked or raw – are considered delicacies, you needn’t bother looking for Michelin-starred restaurants. Residents there are obviously rating the relative tastiness of foodstuffs based on how they compare to your typical compost pile. Life there is tough, tougher than raw marmot kidneys. We should airlift pallets of Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ Sauce to these taste-deprived areas as a humanitarian gesture. They should at least know what “flavor” is before they die.
Rules That I Found I Didn’t Need the Internet For:
- Rodents are not your friends. This includes rodents with good PR firms and personal makeup consultants, like cute little puffy-cheeked chipmunks (think Chip and Dale), perky little Disney prairie dogs, fluffy-tailed squirrels, and cuddly pet guinea pigs. Assassins, one and all. Treat them as such.
- Rodents are filthy, disease-ridden creatures that generally give vermin a bad name. Some of the diseases that they transmit to humans are Lassa Fever, Leptospirosis, Salmonellosis, Tularemia, the rather obvious Rat-Bite Fever, and my personal favorite, Plague. As the CDC helpfully points out, “A plague vaccine is no longer available in the United States.” Normally, my first-world outrage would know no bounds, but in this case, it hardly matters. It turns out that plague “vaccines” have proven to provide rather unpredictable protection, so much so that if someone who’s been vaccinated believes they’ve been exposed, the standard course of treatment is the same series of antibiotics that would be administered to anyone who hadn’t been vaccinated. In fact, the vaccine apparently provides about the same antimicrobial protection as, say, a gin and tonic, so I’ll stick with my personal formulary, thank you.
- The CDC guidance to “wear gloves if you are handling or skinning potentially infected animals” is not a left- or right-wing hoax. Follow your own religion on face-masks, but seriously people, wear gloves to handle infected rodents. Even your mom would encourage this. Special benefit: if you always wear anti-rodent gloves, you don’t have to do all that tedious hand-washing.
So just as you thought your biggest health concern this year was going to be COVID, the article has more good news. “The plague has recently made a comeback, and the World Health Organization has categorized it as a re-emerging disease.” Couldn’t happen here? “Last week, a squirrel in the US state of Colorado tested positive for the plague.”
I guess I’d best go pour another dose of my plague vaccine over ice.
Tonight’s Episode of “Our Friend, the Marmot” by Ed Ward is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.