The CDC, Raw Cookie Dough, and Sexy Theocracy

“I thought maybe we could make ginger bread houses, and eat cookie dough, and go ice skating, and maybe even hold hands.” – Elf

Don’t ask for whom the Toll House tolls.  The Toll House tolls for you!

Normally when I do a health post I put my weasel words saying “I’m not a doctor” at the end of the post.  I mean, if you’re at this website the last thing you are is stupid.  You KNOW I’m not a doctor and I don’t prescribe drugs except on an amateur basis, and then it’s generally, “Pipe down about Ariana Grande masterminding the fake moon landing and have another beer.  Everyone knows that an Ariana Grande is actually a yeasty pumpkin spice latte from Starbucks©.”

However, in this case I’m not talking about yeasty, mediocre pop singers, I’m telling you that the Centers for Disease Control® (CDC™) is staffed by (at least some) idiots who really are doctors, well, the disclaimer should come up front.  So, here it is:  I’m not a doctor, this isn’t medical advice, and take some damn responsibility for your own life and everybody knows that it was Katy Perry was the mediocre pop singer that masterminded the fake moon landing.

So hardcore she killed that Muppet® herself, just to show the other Muppets© how fearless she was.  Or was that G. Katy Perry?

Okay.  Now for the actual rant.

In its continual bid to be the ugly, smelly kid in class who stares at you just a little too long with the charisma of a damp goat, the Creepy Disaster Chumps© (CDC™) issued its annual holiday pronouncement of, “Hey, it’s Christmas, America.  Have a good time and we’ll talk after the New Year.  Sound good?”

No.  This is government, so of course you’re being warned against the civilization-ending threat of (I’m not kidding) raw cookie dough the by the Centers for Disease Control Cookie Dough Committee® (CDCCDC™).  Yes.  Raw cookie dough, that scourge of humanity that brought down the Incan Empire, the Ming Dynasty, and Johnny Depp’s career.

Of course raw cookie dough is bad for you, but not in the way the Citizen Drama Creators© (CDC™) thinks.  Raw cookie dough is bad for you since it’s loaded with carbs and sugar and tastes the way that I can only imagine heroin feels.  But cookies are tasty, and, even if you’re a low-carb cultist (I am), a cookie at Christmas is okay for you unless you inject the dough.  Protip:  if a syringe is large enough to inject a chocolate chip, it’s not gonna make it through airport security no matter what story you tell.

It does, however, appear that raw cookie dough can make you ill in rare circumstances.  You see, in the United States, one in 20,000 eggs is contaminated with salmonella.  20,000 eggs?  It would take 64 years at 6 eggs a week to get to 20,000.  Cooking, thankfully, kills salmonella – so it’s 64 years of raw or undercooked eggs.  Clearly, this is an unacceptable risk.  Your eggs should all be cooked to the consistency of a leather thong.

You were thinking something else!  So was I.  There are places you just don’t want to go on Google®.

But wait!  The Chowder Disco Cowgirls® (CDC™) reminds us that cookies contain raw flour, too.  Raw flour?  Is that a thing?  Yes!  In fact, 63 people in the United States were made ill by raw flour in 2016.  63!  It’s an epidemic!  Soon these people will become raw flour zombies and the streets (okay, one really small one lane street) will be filled with them and their insatiable desire for raw flour.

Thankfully, I’m betting that Grandmothers everywhere will still be handing the rich, doughy beaters covered with cookie dough off to the greedy fat hands of toddlers (it’s really the only way to get their iPhones© away from them) for a sticky, sugary treat.  From there, the cookie dough/saliva mix creates a compound stronger than diamond plated steel that instantly bonds itself at the molecular level to any surface, which explains why it is still stuck to the bottom of the Wilder kitchen table after fifteen years.

If I were him, I’d hide.  Katy Perry is looking for something to wear to the Oscars®.  And it’s between Cookie Monster© and Oscar the Grouch™.

But as a society, what does that say about us if we’re that afraid of . . . cookies?  According to one study I read, the lifetime odds of being killed by an asteroid are 1 in 250,000, which is still higher than your odds of meeting someone who works for the Department of Motor Vehicles that has a sense of humor.

The number of verified deaths from eating raw cookie dough that I found was . . . one.  Out of 300,000,000, people, this equates to a risk of 1 in 3.8 million over a 78 year lifetime.  But let’s pretend that one person a decade dies from eating raw cookie dough.  You’re still 4,500 times more likely to die falling out of bed.  But the Chronic Doom Cherubs® (CDC™) have yet to weigh in against the scourge of pillow-topped mattresses ravaging our land.

I then went against all of my better instincts and did the one thing a blogger should never do:  I researched.  The origin of the Centers for Dingo Carnage© (CDC™) is actually a noble one.  During World War II, the United States decided that we wanted to kill the enemy and not let malaria spoil all the fun, and got pretty good at killing the mosquitos that carried malaria.  Fun fact:  the atomic bomb was originally designed to kill mosquitos but was abandoned because it couldn’t be made to fit into a spray can.

Modern Mosquito Hunting Techniques.

But all good wars end, and here were a bunch of bona fide mosquito-killing ninjas who were good at killing the mosquitos that carried malaria.  The government decided that we could use those guys to stop malaria in the United States.  They went straight to work, and malaria was all but eradicated by 1951, only four years later – in 2018 the paperwork alone for starting the project would take a decade as the Friends of Malaria sued in federal court to stop the eradication of the endangered mosquito.  But living in a less enlightened era, they eradicated malaria and everyone was pretty okay with that.  So, they disbanded the agency, and put people to work doing other productive things.

No, I’m kidding!  Once government builds a hammer, after they run out of nails they keep using it on the dishes and drywall.  It worked great on the nails, right?  Maybe we need a committee to develop stronger dishes?

The newly named Communicable Disease Center (this name is real, and is the original word salad that gave us the CDC™ initials) became a solution in search of a problem.  We expected the Koreans or Chinese (or someone) to spray us with biological agents.  So, the CDC® said, “Hey, we can fix that problem that we just made up.”  Thankfully, they’ve never had to do anything significant on that front.

Eventually, the CDC™ also got bored and distracted enough sometime during the 1960’s that they led the effort eradicate smallpox, and even someone as cynical as I am about government agencies have to give them a golf clap for that one.  To this day the CDC™ and the Russians have the last two samples of smallpox in the world, and the CDC™’s is stored in the fridge next to the guacamole and that Wal-Mart® chicken salad that Carol left in there last Thursday.

Don’t get me wrong:  The CDC™ has a legitimate role as a coordination center for communicable diseases, and protecting the United States from diseases originating all around the world – 70% of the tuberculosis cases in the United States are from people that weren’t born in the United States.  And Ebola or its yet-undiscovered cousin lurking in the rainforest (hopefully they get that pesky jungle cut down soon) has the potential to be devastating in our high mobility society complete with populations concentrated in megacities across the planet.  Like an asteroid strike, this is a very high consequence event that will impact us in the future.  World War One killed as many as 20 million people.  The Spanish Flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, or between 3% and 5% of the world’s population, in 1918 and 1919.

Yikes.  Yeah.  Somebody needs to be working on that.

And somebody should also be working on protecting us from bioterrorism, but I strongly doubt it’s the CDC™.  The CDC™ is the only agency I know of that’s managed to misplace smallpox in their other pants, along with the keys to the CDC™ golf cart.  Oh, and the CDC™ also exposed their own employees to anthrax, and not just the heavy metal band.  Since these things really happened, we need to make sure an adult is at the wheel.  And, please Comic Distribution Clowns® (CDC™), no more comic books about zombies.  If there is anything with less soul than a comic book about zombies by a government health agency, it might be a government health agency warning us about eating cookie dough.

Readers of this blog know I’m all for people being prepared.  But the CDC®?  Zombies™?  Please leave the misleading and incomplete preparedness information to FEMA™.    

So, by all means, please have the charisma of a wet goat the CDC™, avoid the consequence of minimal personal responsibility involving infinitesimal risk, and just tell your grandchildren “no” when they want to lick the beater after you make sugar cookies.  I’m not sure that kids of today would even notice – recess at school nowadays consists of “competitive sitting quietly,” “standing quietly and motionlessly near the wall,” and “counting the days until a government-based Christian theocracy turns women into harems for Trump supporters.”  That sounds so much more fun than playing tackle football in the fifth grade on a rock covered field and having snowball fights.  And actual fights.  I sure missed out as a kid.

Yes, it’s a retread.  But it’s a sexy theocratic retread. 

This certainly isn’t the case of a government agency that’s looking for publicity by making outlandish claims to scare people about risks that are less likely than being killed by lighting?  Nah.  Government is here because it loves you!  Or because government needs something to do between drinking yeasty Ariana Grande lattes and faking moon landings.

Not mine, but funny.