Flesh-eating bacteria. Do you know how difficult it is to get this horrific disease? Well, neither do I. I do know that it has never come up in conversation with anyone I know. Not once have I told the story of the German Shepherd-shaped scar on my back (caused by shingles) and had someone chime in with, "yeah, that's kinda messed up, but did I tell you about when I had..." Not then, and not in any of the other thousand conversational situations (including the bizarre questions I occasionally ask) where "I've had a flesh-eating bacteria" might come up. I've never even heard "I have this friend..."
This shit is not easy to get.
And when it is contracted the appropriate medical authorities are notified and it's cause is meticulously tracked to make sure the public is safe. Unfortunately that does nothing to quell hysteria. And by hysteria I mean the random emails I periodically receive that promise just such a horror for doing something mundane. Usually wearing (not just trying on) unwashed new clothing.
Somehow the afflicted area is always a breast. According to several sites I found through the wonders of Google, NF requires a break in the skin. Do the people who make this shit up think breast wounds are common? (Yes, I'm aware that the reason it's always the breast has much more to do with Freud than it does with logic) And the email is always accompanied by a terrifying photo or two.
Once I found this obviously doctored photo in my inbox along with roughly the same story as reported on Snopes. ("Breast Rash")
But only once for that one, and technically it didn't claim to be NF. Instead this one is supposedly caused by a larvae of unknown origin or species. Either way it's disgusting and somehow specific to the breast.
Several times though I've found
this series of photos in my inbox. (
EXTREMELY DISTURBING!!! ... don't say I didn't warn you. By the way, Snopes has no conclusive evidence of the origins of the photos, but they appear to be the advanced stages of breast cancer.) They always claim to be a necrotizing fasciitis and they all claim to have contracted it from new and unwashed clothing. Sometimes the warning is that this was passed on by a previous customer who tried on the clothing. As if fashion is a top priority when you have a terrible and, by these accounts, insanely contagious disease. Other times it is attributed to a factory worker who should have called in sick and instead infects your clothing... in Asia or South America, by the way; a long way for a disease to travel with no living host. Whatever the reason given it's all bullshit. An updated "old wives tale" that is designed to scare the crap out of you.
There are two very good reasons I wash my clothes before wearing them, and neither has anything to do with disease. The first of formaldehyde. If your clothing was imported from a third world country, and odds are it was, then it had to pass through customs. If it doesn't pass quickly then it needs to be kept free from insects and rodents, so it usually gets a light spraying of formaldehyde. (That's also what makes new carpet reek.) I prefer to wash that out of my clothes before wearing them as the smell gives me a headache. The second reason is colorfastness. I hate when colors bleed all over each other and a quarter cup of vinegar in the first wash usually stops that.
What really kills me about these email is that they almost always come from the same person. An otherwise intelligent person. And they're never prefaced with anything but an echo of the scary message instead of the "can you believe people buy this???" that I would preface them with. I think she may actually believe them, like this is some sort of epidemic that no one is talking about. It doesn't occur to her that we live in a world that thinks Purell is a good idea and that if even one person got anything so disgusting from something done by thousands of people every day it would be all over the news. CNN would send Wolf Blitzer, a medical analyst, and fifteen camera people. Ann Coulter would be yammering on about how this is somehow the fault of the liberal medical system and only the GOP can save you. In about a week it would be illegal to try on or return clothing. It simply doesn't make sense. I do not understand this kind of fear.
So I roll my eyes, remind myself that even smart people fall for dumb crap, and hit delete.
