Do you have your firing out of cootie?

A sprout and mysterious outbreak of transmissible disease recently started in my apartment building in Manhattan. Three 7 -year -old young people, a boy and two girls, shared the elevator one day with a caregiver and a random adult (I). The boy leaned on the back of the elevator, between the two girls. “Help! I’m on a girl’s sandwich,” she said. “If I don’t care, I’m going to get cooties!”

“Children still play cootias?” I asked, surprised that the cootias were not a relic of my childhood boomer, but had endured in the 21st century, still causing alarm, pretended or real, among young people. “Yes, Huh,” said the boy. One of the girls channeled, “I know how to give a cootie shot.” He demonstrated on his shoulder, his technique slightly blurred.

The children and their caregiver headed to the flat, leaving for the first time to reflect the Cootie phenomenon in many decades. Beyond having fun, the morbid infection of children, which mimics the infection at a time when the skepticism of the vaccine is increasing and a outbreak of a non-pretending disease, measles, threatens the lives of southwest children. I learned that there is a vibrant slice of academic literature on “ Preteen Cootie Lore ”, as a scholar says, and that this degree of degree of degree is more closely linked to the real public health concerns than you could think if your COOTIE expert only drifts from the play plan.

What exactly are COOTIES? Since the 1960’s, field researchers have collected definitions of different specificities from grammar respondents: “boys’ siblings”, “girls germs”, “something that kills you”, “like germs, has germs in this regard”, “where someone licks the bottom of the chair or eating paper.” Other experts talk about more anthropological terms. Milwaukee’s Wisconsin University of Wisconsin, Simon J. Bronner, has characterized cooties as a “ritualized affliction.” In his 1976 seminal book, A potato, two potatoes: the folklore of American childrenHerbert and Mary Knapp described cooties as a kind of sport. “There are no supervised cootie leagues, but more people in the United States have played cootias than having played basketball, basketball and football,” they wrote. “It’s our unofficial national game.”

Cootias certainly have something to do with hygiene. According to one (slightly dirty) Analysis of Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, an anthropologist from the new School for Social Research, the cooties are “a social pollutant that pass from one child to another”, consisting of “the invisible particles associated with germs, fedles or” boogers “. The opprobation is attached to the relationships of girls-children, Adult).

Cootie’s story is clearer. The word itself began life as a British colonial term, probably a corruption of kutuA malay word for lice and other chopped insects. North -American soldiers picked up, as it was, their allies during World War New York Times 1918 report, headed “Doughboys lose cooties”, described the soldiers who “scratch themselves with revenge” aligning in a “disinfectant plant” led by the American Red Cross. A “Lanky New England Lad” exclaims: “I have all the cooties in France”. In the 1920’s, the leading games for cootias became popular in bridal showers, in honor of bride and groom that had served in Europe (and also caused by sublimated anxiety by other communicable diseases that could have been taken at home). A version consisted of drawing separate parts of an error, based on rolls of a dice, until a winner had a chicken. This practice evolved into Cootie, the game in which children gather plastic insects with Fiddlehead-Ferrn proboscis, which was introduced nationally in 1949 and is still manufactured today.

The form of invisible cootias that appears in the American part has affected American playgrounds at some point in the 1930’s, but surveys suggest that it did not become ubiquitous until the early 1950’s, at the height of the polyomyelitis epidemic. Before the poliomyelitis vaccine enters 1955, tens of thousands of children were catching the disease every year; Thousands died and left more paralyzed. In his book Explaining traditions: Popular behavior in modern cultureBronner writes that cootie cooties and features: “Circle Circle, Dot” being a classic formulation, it was a way for children “to dramatize the fear of illness.” Cootias was also popular in the 1980’s, when children felt much more information about AIDS.

Explaining traditions: Popular behavior in modern culture

By Simon J. Bronner

This type of imitative game, not only cooties, but also police or police and robberies, children make sense of the world. Like the nursery rhymes, it can also be comments, even a kind of art of satirical outsider. Like Iona Opie, a pioneer British folklorist, once observed: “Go to the courtyard; a kind of unpleasant blur surrounds you. Children make fun of life.” It was apparently the case during the first days of the coronavirus pandemic. Bronner told me that while the schools were closed and the children were isolated at home, they began to send -Memories in which COOTIES tended to represent a kind of widespread pandemic funk. In addition, remitties were often represented as babies: in the interpretation of Bronner, a humorous expression of their frustration in not being able to do normal things for children.

I guess it is comforting that, five years after Covid-19 was declared for the first time in pandemic, my lift acquaintances had returned to a cootie play style, interpreting their venerable parody of infection and protecting themselves with shots in their arm. But the epidemiological satire adopts a particularly dark distribution when it expresses more faith in the power of vaccination than the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy has dismissed the scientifically proven effectiveness of the polio vaccine as “mythology”, despite the fact that polyomielitis has been considered in the United States since 1979 (before confirmed, a spokesman said: “Mr Kennedy believes that the polio vaccine should be available to the public and properly studied. Historical and scary break of measles in the south -now infected to more than 600 people in the United States and has killed two unvaccinated children in Texas: the first deaths of measles in America in a decade. Measles in relation to Texas outbreak.)

Kennedy has talked about the advantages of the MMR vaccine, but he also continues to undermine his safety and efficiency. Repeatedly emphasized parental choice in vaccination and, as The Atlantic He informed, told the father that he hung from a son of Texas: “You no longer know what is in the vaccine.” It insists on promoting alternative treatments not proven such as cod loop oil (a source of vitamin A), antibiotics and steroids; In an interview with Fox News, he stated that they can lead to “almost miraculous and instantaneous recovery.” According to real virologists, this is a prodigious exaggeration of the effectiveness of vitamin A and, in the case of the other supposed miraculous care, is a pure invention.

An even more fantasy treatment can be a fantasy treatment, but unlike vitamin A, overcoming will not cause liver damage, which the Texas pediatricians said The New York Times They are now seeing in unvaccinated young patients, whose parents allegedly paid Kennedy Feed. When so many adults seem to intent to return to the dark age, we must love medical wisdom where we find it. By 2025, Cootie’s shot is an inadvertent review of the country’s maximum health official, as it emphasizes the actual effectiveness of vaccines against the disease. I wonder if the HHS secretary has ever heard this anecdote from his own family history. On February 25, 1923, his grandmother Rose Kennedy recorded the following in his magazine: “Joe Jr. and Jack have a new song on the Bedbugs and the COOTIES. Also a club where new members begin by sticking -Pins.” The Uncles of RFK Jr. (they probably received vaccines against smallpox) invented cootie traits? A topic for more research.