Mesothelioma
MESOTHELIOMA!
It’s sweeping Oklahoma!
It’s devastating Roma!
And even Barceloma!
MESOTHELIOMA!
It’s always on the TVs!
It makes us apoplectic!
It gives us heebie-jeebies!
MESOTHELIOMA!
It’s raiding Arizona!
It’s drying up Tacoma!
It’s wrecked the Astrodoma!
MESOTHELIOMA!
It creeps into your cellar!
It festers in your pillows!
And turns your bedsheets yellar!
MESOTHELIOMA!
it puts you in a coma!
It gives you Melanoma!
And darkens your Glaucoma!
MESOTHELIOMA!
You’ll have to get a lawyer!
You’ll need a brace of doctors!
It really will annoy ya!
MESOTHELIOMA!
Will curl your styrofoama!
And melt your ice-cream cona!
And dry up your bologna!
MESOTHELIOMA!
Nobody can avoid it!
It hits you like a dirt truck!
There’s no way to destroy it!
MESOTHELIOMA!
It’s wiped out Texahoma!!
And curdled old Pomona!
And mucked up poor Daytona!
MESOTHELIOMA!
It’s coming now to get you!
All hope is down the drain now!
You have no chance of rescue!
MESOTHELIOMA!
It feeds your hematoma!
It grows your papilloma!
It has a foul aroma!
You’ll never hit a homer….
It wrinkles your diploma….
Untunes your xylophona….
It fades the art at MOMA….
And shuts off your cell phona….
You’ll never get a bona….
With MESOTHELIOMA!
Asbestos posse: “Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work we go!”
Help Is On The Way
If a fellow didn’t know better---and some don’t---he might think the universe was falling in on him. The fearsome blight of television ads regarding Mesothelioma could have one convinced that giant meso-drops are falling from the skies like acid rain, contaminating the masses below and requiring the immediate aid of a lawyer experienced in such catastrophes. Not a doctor, mind you, to analyze the depth of the problem and perhaps brush the droplets off one’s shoulders and send him home with a bottle of Anacin, but a hardnosed attorney ready to sue the bejeezus out of the culprits who caused the dreadful problem.
Do you have Mesothelioma? Maybe, maybe not, it can be hard to prove. It also can be difficult to prove you don’t (like whiplash), especially when you have a team of crack meso-detectives at your disposal, doctors and lawyers and Indian chiefs who will attest to your agonies, express their outrage, and demand that someone pay the consequences. Altruistic as these folks may be, we all have expenses and so does your meso-team, which will regretfully be required to nip off roughly one-third of your settlement award to refurbish the interiors of their Teslas. After all, appearances are important in this day and age.
Truth be told, Mesothelioma is categorized as a “very rare” disease, afflicting perhaps 20,000 souls a year, if that. It’s hard to tell since the attorneys employ squads of Evidence Concoctors to make their cases. There is almost no defining single act or set of occurences immediately evident because exposure to asbestos may have occurred 20-40 years previous. And with all the asbestos around in the good old days (maybe it was in the walls of your house and also at work or school), when, exactly you were affected.
Companies which manufactured asbestos products or businesses where employees worked with them are generally considered liable for causing the disease because they failed to warn their workers as part of an industry-wide coverup. Most of these companies filed for bankruptcy and are protected from lawsuits, but the U.S. government required them to create asbestos trust funds with sufficient capital to pay off a portion of the coming claims. Virtually anyone alive in the Asbestos Era can file a grievance. Once the claim (not a lawsuit) is filed, overseers who manage the trusts determine the amount of compensation based on certain categories, levels of disease and medical criteria. There are more than 50 asbestos trusts in existence today with an estimated $30 billion in assets, thus there is plenty of room for chicanery.
“Don’t wait. Call the number on the screen NOW!” the asbestos attorneys’ ads insist. That’s because there are statutes of limitation from the date of diagnosis to file a claim. You wait too long, you get no chowder. And hey, those Tesla refabrications can’t wait forever.
The Blessings Of Radon
Okay, you don’t have Mesothelioma but you might have RADON, a mysterious gas which sneaks up into your house from the bowels of Hell and gives you dysintery, The Bends, alopecia, testicular grouchiness and the heartbreak of psoriasis. In a pinch, maybe lung cancer.
You won’t contract any of this nonsense, however, if you will simply purchase and utilize one of the slick Radon Gas Test Kits easily available at any leading home improvement mart. First Alert has one for a mere $14.48 at Lowe’s, an outfit called AirThings has a better one for $199.90 at Walmart, OR you can opt for the creme-de-la-creme of Radon detecters, the fabulous Yogi home air quality assessment kit for….ahem….a sobering $799. In all fairness, the Yogi will not only test for Radon but will also search for molds, uproot allergens, track down lead, sniff out formaldehyde, check the quality of your drinking water, snug you into your slippers and bring you an aperitif. Not bad for a lousy $799.
But who says Radon is all that scary? The Environmental Protection Agency claims it is the second leading cause of cancer, just behind cigarettes, but what do they know? When non-smokers develop lung cancer, the EPA doesn’t go running down to their houses to check on Radon exposure. And even if there’s a cloud of Radon sitting on your property, maybe it’s a good thing. In Misasa, Japan, doctors report that people who live in villages with high Radon levels in the drinking water exhibit far lower rates of cancer than people in adjacent villages.
Water from springs in Ramsar, Iran is rich in Radon. The highest environmental levels of radiation in the world have been recorded in Ramsar, but no increase in leukemia or cancer rates has been observed. The radioactivity there is brought to the surface by the waters of hot springs, visited by locals and tourists. The concentrations of radium in hot springs in Ramsar are 18 times higher than found in other waters in the same country. People in Ramsar consume 12 times more radium from vegetables in their area than what is considered to be a toxic dose of radiation, yet have lived for generations in relatively good health despite high radiation, poor nutrition, lack of availability of physicians and low population density. Is there some kind of unrecognized protection from low-dose radium and Radon gas rather than a health hazard? Should we sprinkle a bit of the stuff on our asparagus, dip our nachos in a Radon spread, maybe dump a tad in our Cap’n Crunch? Is anybody working on the commercials? How about, “It’s double-rich, double-good, Radon Gas Gum!” Be the first in your neighborhood.
Has Anybody Here Seen Bird Flu?
You remember Avian Influenza. It was all the rage a decade back, an oncoming pandemic worse than Bubonic Plague that would decimate humanity and leave the world to the rats and roaches. In one month early in the panic, over 40,000 articles were written on this inevitable blight, 1300 every day. Nitwits talked about shooting down pigeons and setting traps for their friendly neighborhood sparrows. But the bird flu, specifically the diabolical H5N1 strain, never made it in on the bus from Sukabumi. That’s because the disease, very fast-acting in the fowl community and often causing death within 48 hours of transmission, doesn’t readily transfer to humans. The majority of cases, which can occur when people are in close contact with infected poultry for long periods of time, have been in Southeast Asia. In the U.S., as everybody knows, we try to keep our visits to infected poultry to a couple of hours on the weekends.
Cleopatra’s Revenge
Remember West Nile Disease? The news media warned of giant swarms of cantankerous mosquitoes heading straight for your neighborhood in 2002, causing widespread panic and mammoth sales of Off! insecticides. West Nile first poked its head up in New York City in 1999, the first time the virus had been identified outside the Eastern Hemisphere. Within a 3-year period, it had swept across the United States to California, establishing itself in 44 states and the District of Columbia. But by August of 2002, only 425 human cases had been reported, with only 20 deaths. Not a happy event for the Unlucky 20, but hardly The Red Death.
In the early 1990s, there was an outbreak of a mysterious and deadly outlaw in the Four Corners area of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah called the Sin Nombre virus, a member of the unpopular hantavirus family, which should never have been allowed to move into the neighborhood. Sin Nombre causes a disease called hantavirus pulmonary syndrome which makes your lungs very unhappy. But since there are no actual people in the Four Corners area, the virus caught a west-bound train and was never heard from again. Until 2012, that is, when hikers in the Signature Tent Cabins in Yosemite National Park’s Curry Village began getting sick and even dying. Tabloid newspapers went nuts with the story and suddenly the hantavirus was skulking across the country looking for victims. It didn’t find many, though, and the poor disappointed critter was last seen sipping a cup of lemon-ginger tea at an assisted living facility in Pasadena.
Everybody remembers Mad Cow disease, which swept in from England and scared the dickens out of everyone for months. Mad Cow, as everybody knows, is the common name for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, a prion disease which gets its name due to its transmission via beef. The human form of Mad Cow is called Cruetzfeldt-Jakob Disease. Ingesting the prions (nervous system tissue) of cattle with the illness causes the person eating the tissue to become infected and often die within a few months. Some who don’t die develop holes in their brain parts, almost never a good thing. Especially when those parts are the ones that are responsible for keeping you calm. So NOW we’ve got people with holes in their brains running through the streets like lunatics, which sounds a lot like (a) a bad zombie movie, or (b) a Donald Trump political rally. All of this was very bad business for beef-peddlers like McDonald’s and Burger King, which began to consider porcupine patties. Then, just when everyone was jumping up and down with Mad Cow anxiety, the disease was offered a better job in the islands with a raise in salary and better benefits, and was never heard from again.
If there’s one thing we should learn from all this, it’s that The End is usually further away than one may think. Humanity-destroying plagues, predictions of Doom, expectations of The Rapture….best to take a breath. Most of us will be taking the Local instead of the Express. Nobody wants to be the guy, after all, who is certain he’s dying of yaws, gives away all his earthlies and discovers six months later he’s disease-free. Or the wizard who rejects all the planet has to offer, waves goodbye and climbs to the mountaintop to await deliverance by those aliens who never come. What could be worse than that?
Oh, that’s right. There’s always Mesothelioma.
That’s all, folks….
