germ theory

I work at a public university, and if there’s anything possibly spreading faster than swine flu around here, it’s swine flu HYSTERIA.  I receive at least one email memo per day about H1N1.  Hand sanitizer dispensers have popped up on campus everywhere I turn.  Signs are posted in the bathrooms warning us to wash our hands and not touch our faces and stay home if we feel sick.  Academic Affairs has been flipping out about revising the attendance policies because of the rash of H1N1 sufferers. The student paper seems to be doing an ongoing series wherein they update us with the total number of confirmed cases in large font headline on the front page each week.

And as the toll of the infected climbs higher and higher, I can’t help but feel like we’re postponing the inevitable.  It’s like I’m just sitting here in my office, waiting for a typhoid Mary to come in and deliver the sickness.

And it got me to thinking… maybe they should just lock us all, sick or not, in the gym until everyone is sick.  Then they could close campus for a week, let everyone get it over with, and then we could all get on with our lives.

Now, this plan might be entirely insane, and I am NOT a medical professional or epidemiologist or anything of the sort.  But to me it makes a certain amount of sense– I am more and more convinced that by the time our doses of the vaccine arrive, half the campus will already be sick.

In the meantime, I use the sanitizer whenever I walk past it, and I’m planning to get the vaccine if I can.