So Now We Need the CDC to Tell Us Not to Make Out with Turtles

The CDC has some important advice for people who would rather not catch salmonella: Don’t kiss turtles. Specifically, don’t kiss very small turtles.

“Turtles with shells less than 4 inches long are a known source of illness,” the CDC’s website warned late last week. So I guess if you’ve got a turtle much larger than four inches, go on and knock yourself out — but first, make sure the turtle consents.

Before we get to the (not) deadly and (not-at-all) widespread salmonella outbreak, please note that I’m not making light of the potentially dangerous bacterial infection. Salmonella can cause very nasty things to explosively emit from various large orifices, along with massive headaches, chills, and other unpleasantries. In extreme cases, the resulting dehydration can be bad enough to require brief hospitalization. Out of all the weird stuff we’ve seen go mainstream these last few years, thank goodness, there’s no evidence of any movement to normalize a salmonella fetish. At least at the time of this writing.

That said, the CDC warns of a “multistate outbreak” involving 26 individuals who apparently ingested the bacteria after getting too friendly with their turtles. “Don’t kiss or snuggle your turtle, and don’t eat or drink around it,” because infected turtle droppings “can easily spread to their bodies, tank water, and anything in the area where they live and roam.”

I’ve made a helpful Venn diagram* to explain the very salmonella risk faced by ordinary, everyday Americans like you and me and weird Uncle Ted, who kisses turtles.

Twenty-six people have been infected, and nine have been hospitalized. None have died. Those figures, while encouraging, make my ridiculous Venn diagram look even more ridiculous.

Unfortunately, due to the limitations of desktop and laptop monitors that are only rarely hundreds of feet across, I was unable to produce the chart to the correct scale. In actuality, the Venn circle labeled “People Who Kiss Turtles” would have to be hundreds of thousands of times smaller than it appears next to the larger Venn circle. Even so, the tiny overlap area was too small to capture. It should read: “People Who Actually Got Sick,” and it, too, should appear much smaller than it does.

According to The Hill, salmonella “causes more than 1.3 million infections, 26,500 hospitalizations and 420 deaths in the U.S. every year.” But “raw, uncooked food products is its most common source,” not getting overly frisky with your local Testudines.

For what it’s worth, as a kid I used to catch baby red-ear slider turtles on the Gasconade River, usually no bigger than an inch or so around. The little ones are sneaky, fast, and not easy to keep hold of. Nevertheless, I must have caught dozens and dozens of them over the years and never once got sick. It also never occurred to me to get fresh with any of them, not even once.

A bit more seriously, it’s impossible not to feel a little sorry for the lower-level folks who have to issue an “Investigation Notice” like this one. They probably signed up for the federal government’s premiere health agency thinking they’d be saving the world like Dustin Hoffman in “Outbreak.” Instead, they’re stuck writing up Very Serious Reports warning people not to kiss turtles because two dozen people suffered some foul gastric distress.

But then I remember what celebrity medical spokesmodel Anthony “Doctor” Fauci and his high-level CDC cohort did to this country during the Nasty Flu Pandemic of 2020-21, and it makes me want to (figuratively) nuke the entire agency and everyone in it.

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*Yes, I’ve already received an offer to head up Kamala Harris’s new Vice Presidential Venn Diagram Initiative, and despite a very generous budget and staffing, I’ve regretfully had to turn her down.