As of this weekend, there were over 1800 verified cases of monkeypox in the US including two in Wisconsin. The last time monkeypox was a threat to our country was 2003 but it was contained after only 71 cases were confirmed with over half of them (39) being here in our state. At that time, I wrote about monkeypox for a now defunct local newspaper. Other than a reference to a now retired, large-headed local news anchor, 19-years later most of it seems just as relevant to our current outbreak.
CRAZY LIKE A POX by Rick McNeal (July 2003)
By the time you read this, I will probably already be dead.
At least that’s the only conclusion I can reach after watching the nightly news.
Newscasters are the modern Angels of Death. Every night they warn us of the impending danger of terrorism, SARS, chronic wasting disease, mad cow disease, West Nile virus and that not-so-fresh feeling! I always knew I would someday have to face the Grim Reaper, I just didn’t expect him to look like Tom Milbourn!
It’s no wonder depression and anxiety are the leading forms of mental illness afflicting Americans. Only somebody delusional could possibly watch the news every night and not get depressed and anxious. Frankly, in this day and age, you’d have to be crazy NOT to be suffering from a mental illness.
However, with apologies to all those bony bucks, brain-addled bovines and biting bugs from Bubastis, it’s the danger du jour being splayed across my TV screen that has really captured my imagination. Of course, I’m talking about monkeypox!
For those who have not been following the monkeypox saga, the disease evidently entered our country when it hitched a ride on a giant Gambian rat that was imported from Africa to an Illinois pet store. Truth be told, Illinois needs another rat like Hollywood needs another Wayans! Anyone who thinks Illinois doesn’t have enough vermin of its own has apparently never attended a Bears home game or visited Door County on a Labor Day weekend.
In the pet store, the Gambian rat got chummy with some prairie dogs that were bound for swap meets, trailer parks and anywhere else populated by emotionally needy adults trying to get back at parents who wouldn’t let them have a hamster when they were kids.
From there, the virus got passed around faster than a joint at a Phish concert. The rat infected the prairie dogs, prairie dogs infected humans, humans infected other humans and now if you’re alive and reading this you’re probably among the final survivors living in the last underground city.
Symptoms of monkeypox include fever, chills, rashes, lesions and a burning desire to pleasure oneself while watching an old Charlton Heston movie.
Does it bother anyone else that for just walking through an airport wearing a burnoose, an American can be forced to undergo a full body cavity search that probes so deeply it would make a Muppet cringe? Yet, every day hundreds of creeping, crawling, fur-bearing would-be Ebola carriers, potentially infected with more viral strains than a Motley Crue roadie are imported to the U.S. as playthings?
Many people seem surprised that something as cute as a prairie dog can cause so many problems. Not me. I’ve been on to those fuzzy little balls of evil for years!
It was my 35th birthday. I celebrated with a friend of mine, whom I’ll call Andrea (because that’s her name). We spent the day at a northeast Wisconsin petting zoo. (Do I know how to party or what?)
After wandering through a corral of overly familiar goats, we came upon something that looked like a sand filled liter box for a cat the size of a Humvee. It was the prairie dog pen.
Andrea put a quarter in one of those omnipresent retrofitted gumball machines and got a palm full of Purina Rodent Chow. She squatted down and extended her hand. One of the critters scampered over and began gingerly shoveling the pellets into his tiny mouth with his dainty paw. “They’re so cute! You’ve got to try this!” Andrea shouted. I assured her that while eating out of her hand looked like fun, I wasn’t hungry for rodent food.
Once she explained what she meant, I agreed to give it a shot.
I bent over the wall of the enclosure and held a hand full of pellets under the adorable little varmint’s mouth. The endearing scamp proceeded to bite down with his vice-like jaws on my tender middle finger. Shocked, I reflexively yanked my hand away but, oops, the hairy little son-of-a-bitch was still hanging on to my freshly damaged digit. His grip held until the upward motion of my arm reached it’s apex before letting loose and flying (and I do mean flying) in the opposite direction.
I watched him sail through the air, in what seemed like slow motion, willing him to fall harmlessly on the soft sand inside the pen rather than on the hard, bruising ground on the outside. What happened was neither. Instead, he smashed against the inside wall of the enclosure making the same gurgling “thwuck” sound a water balloon makes when it hits the ground without breaking. He then slowly slid down the wall much like Wile E. Coyote after slamming into a rock formation on which the Roadrunner has just painted a tunnel. All that was missing was the word ACME etched on my hand.
He laid there lifeless….but for only a moment. He then stood up and looked around with the same stunned and confused look on his face that Keanu Reeves gets when a thought enters his head. He shook it off (just like Keanu) and went back to digging and foraging as though nothing had happened. I, on the other hand, spent my 35th birthday with a throbbing, discolored and swollen finger.
That was the day I realized that as cute and cuddly as they may be, prairie dogs are actually mean little bastards with a hidden agenda that falls nothing short of total world domination. It was only a matter of time before they discovered a way to bring us to our knees. Now, armed with the sly cunning of a fox, the powerful bite of a shark and the debilitating pox of a monkey, their day has come!
