In my last post I noted that MMWR was very swine flu focused, but still mixing it up with some other interesting and, let's be honest, weird and entertaining content. This week they lead with a scary (to this dad) article about swine flu deaths among young children, and then follow it up with this absolute, all time classic. It opens strong:
"On April 8, 2009, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) notified officials from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (DPH) in California about a group of preschool teachers with nausea, dizziness, headache, and numbness and tingling of fingertips after consumption of brownies purchased 3 days before from a sidewalk vendor."
As soon as you see brownies you know where this is headed:
"This report summarizes the results of that investigation, which detected cannabinoids in a recovered sample of the brownies."
That's right: someone bought treats on the street and inadvertently (one hopes) dosed their fellow nursery school teachers via good ole fashioned pot brownies. No one got too sick, one person spit out the brownie because it tasted "unusual," and, not surprisingly, "[t]he sidewalk vendor has not been located to date."
Obviously there are lessons here, namely that street vendors should not spike the merchandise and that, for so many reasons, it can pay to skip the random snacks out at work. MMWR is good for those lessons, as valuable personal hygiene and health habits are reinforced and both the menace of the natural world and the folly of mankind are writ large. And let me close by reminding you, on behalf of the CDC, to never eat a dead whale that you find on the beach.
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