Worsening Disability Outbreak Feared in Florida

Grounded - on a par with US electors

These are indeed exciting and grueling times in the field of epidemiology with the onslaught of mutating pathogens and viral threats such as Bird Flu and ebola continuing to challenge research laboratories all over the globe.

And if these weren’t worrisome enough, we just learned that a crack squad of Centers for Disease Control specialists from Atlanta will be arriving in Florida shortly to probe an alarming incidence of ELI cases detected in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale metro area.

ELI or Earthworm-Level Intelligence is the most advanced form of the virulent and highly contagious subintellecta debilitosis syndrome first associated with viewers of Geraldo Rivera programs in the 1970s. In its most endemic manifestation, ELI victims find it utterly impossible to distinguish reality from the most puerile fantasy portrayed in the media no matter how preposterous or patently absurd.

One notably tormented Ohio patient in 1985 actually mailed 6,819 letters to the US Department of the Interior in a single week demanding that the Snuffleupagus on Sesame Street be added to the Endangered Species List. This particular individual was institutionalized for seven months under heavy sedation before being released back into the community and later elected mayor of Cincinnati. A concurrent rise in the numbers of Americans watching FOX-News more or less confirmed the rapid spread of ELI across the country during the past 10 years.




Anatomy of a FOX News fan


According to research done in Canada -- where ELI is mostly confined to the Prairie Provinces -- normal incidence of this disorder should be no more than one case per 250,000 inhabitants. Imagine then the panic at CDC last month when a mind-boggling 37 new cases were detected here in Broward County. Eight of the cases were discovered during a single evening in the city commission chambers of an unnamed municipality including two persons on the dais!

The appalling gravity of the ELI problem first became evident across the entire US 12 years ago when a band of free-spending draft-dodger patriots took power in Washington and chose a man nicknamed for a salamander to lead Congress. Six years afterward thousands of voters in Florida improperly marked their ballots resulting in the current tenant of the White House and a corresponding nadir of U.S. influence and prestige around the globe.

Amphibious leader of chickenhawks

Work on an effective vaccine, meanwhile, has continually been stalled by federal funding cuts due to the burgeoning budget of the Iraq war (the conflict itself a symptom of widespread ELI throughout the U.S. government); Recent political developments in the U.S. suggest the epidemic could be abating in some areas of the nation but it remains to be seen if the rest of the planet can recover from the collateral damage already inflicted.


Alligator Mitigator

A more upbeat environmental note for those Florida friends worried about the seasonal upsurge of quarter-ton reptiles in neighborhood lakes and waterways. It seems the frequency of alligators turning up in West Broward lakes and canals has been climbing steeply in the warmer part of each year usually accompanied by hyperventilated media reports concerning close encounters of the scaly kind.

There’s nothing that will dampen a suburban Fort Lauderdale garden party faster than a 500-lb (230-kg) gator sloshing into the pool, devouring the neighbor’s Shih-tzu or scaring the bejeezus out of Aunt Sophie from Scarsdale.

But Dr. Percival Swinton, a distinguished pioneer on the leading edge of tropical research may have a solution: Piranhas! Ever wondered why the Amazon and Orinoco rivers in the South American interior are relatively untroubled by alligators and crocodiles? Piranhas. Only a runtish cousin, the caiman survives in these waters and in numbers kept in check by ravenous schools of these finny cuisinarts.

Now Dr. Swinton, who has spent 17 years in Venezuela studying the Orinoco Basin ecosystem for Puerto Cabello Petroleum & Potash, wants to stress he’s NOT talking about those common piranhas capable of reducing a human being to skeletal remnants in minutes given the right seasoning. Introducing those fellows into Florida waters would be asking for trouble, he says. Overseas news outlets, for one thing, would be sure to sensationalize accounts of any European tourists who tumbled off airboats.

Amazonian kissing cousin

But the Piranha piranha osculati, (distant cousin to the kissing gourami), a curious subspecies found the backwaters of Guyana, is toothless and must energetically gum its prey into submission. Swinton says that while these fish can’t actually kill alligators, the nuisance of hundreds of little clinging suckers making normal gator locomotion, hunting and reproductive activities impossible, ought to drive the offending reptiles out of local lakes and canals permanently.

Swinton expects an EPA response to his suggestion this summer. And if that population control scheme is rejected, he is ready to advocate another method -- introducing juvenile alligator populations to cigarette smoking assuming, however, they can be taught to keep their heads far enough out of the water.


Professor Kurt Stanislaw Jacobi, a native of Southcentral Wallachia, holds a Ph.D. psycho-harmonic engineering from Comenius University, Bratislava where he graduated summa cum laude in 1948. During the mid-1950's, Dr. Jacobi was a visiting scholar on the faculty of CCNY where he first postulated his now famous integrated theory of inversional constructs (ITIC) which ultimately made possible the Apollo moon landings, biodegradable chewing gum and revival of the Bulgarian nose harp as a serious concert instrument.