Uncle John's Bathroom Reader The World's Gone Crazy (5 page)

New Disease:
Yet to be named

Symptoms:
Fever, malaise, lack of appetite, muscle aches, headache, nausea, vomiting, stiff neck, joint pain, chest pain, testicular pain, propensity to infection, enlarged heart, bleeding in the brain, and death

Discovery:
In December 2006, three people in two hospitals in Melbourne, Australia, received organ transplants from the same man, a 57-year-old who died of a brain hemorrhage after returning from a long stay in Europe. Within weeks, all three transplant patients were dead. Local testing found nothing linking the deaths of the three victims to the organ donor, so samples were sent to the Greene Infectious Disease Laboratory at Columbia University in New York. There, in 2007, using the latest in gene sequencing technology, researchers found a previously unknown virus in each of the transplanted organs. It’s related to a well-known virus called
lymphocytic choreomeningitis
(LCMV), which is tested for in organ transplant cases, but the new virus is genetically distinct enough that it had never been detected. The researchers say the virus may explain why many organ transplants have failed in the past, and the unfortunate deaths of the three Australians may help prevent more fatalities in the future.

New Disease:
Chapare virus hemorrhagic fever

Symptoms:
Fever, headache, muscle and joint pain, bleeding disorders, shock, and death

Discovery:
In 2003 a young man in a small village in Bolivia became sick. Over the next few days, his condition worsened, and a few other people in the area came down with the same illness. Two weeks later, the man was dead. Every test for known diseases came up negative, so a local doctor, Simon Delgado, sent specimens from the man’s body to the CDC. Researchers in the CDC’s most secure lab studied them, and five years later they announced that the man had been killed by an
arenavirus
—a strain of virus that causes hemorrhagic fever (the Ebola virus is another). But it was one they’d never seen before. Only that one death occurred, and it’s still the only known outbreak of what came to be known as the
Chapare
virus illness (after the young victim’s home province), but CDC doctors say it’s probably only a matter of time before it spreads. “There are lot of arenaviruses we don’t know,” Dr. Pierre Rollin said. “Are they going to be the new pandemic virus that’s going to wipe out the planet? I don’t think so.” (How reassuring.)

HE WAS NEITHER

In July 2008, police in Tampa, Florida, arrested a man for selling cocaine within 1,000 feet of a church, a first-class felony. The man’s name: God Lucky Howard.

You are more likely to die on your way to buy a lottery ticket than you are to win the lottery
.

BRITISH BREACHES

And here we thought “breaches” were really nice pants. Turns out that in the secretive world of British Intelligence, it’s something completely different…and it’s not nice at all
.

D
OWN THE TUBE

A British cabinet member (name withheld) often commuted on the London Underground subway and passed the time by reading work documents. One day in June 2008, he was going over the latest version of the government’s top-secret Al-Qaeda profile…and left it on the train. A passenger turned it in, not to the authorities, but to the BBC. The news agency reported the find online, and added that it would be “tragic” if the documents had fallen into the wrong hands.

STATUS UPDATE

In 2009, when Sir John Sawyer was appointed head of MI6, the British government’s spy agency, his wife, Shelley, posted the good news on her Facebook page. Unfortunately, Mrs. Sawyer hadn’t enabled any of the social networking site’s privacy features, meaning that anyone with Internet access could see her page, which contained sensitive information about her and her husband, including where they lived, places they frequently visited, and photos of their children. After the leak was discovered, Mrs. Sawyer hastily made her Facebook page accessible to “friends” only.

PIC OF THE LITTER

An English postal worker bought a digital camera on eBay in September 2008 for about $30 U.S. After he’d used it a few times, he looked through the camera’s memory and found, along with his vacation pictures, photographs of terrorist leaders, missiles, rockets, fingerprints, and snapshots of documents detailing a spy computer system that were so revealing that they could have been used to hack into the network. The postal worker contacted the British government, and after he was interrogated for a few hours and released, he was told that he’d accidentally been sold a camera used by an MI6 agent, whose name was never released to the public.

Trash for the ages: A glass bottle can take as long as 4,000 years to decompose
.

MOMMIES…

How much do they love their daughters? THIS much!

F
AILED
. All Caroline McNeal of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, wanted for her daughter, Brittany, was for her to get ahead…of her classmates. So Caroline, the high-school secretary, used stolen passwords over the course of three years to improve more than 200 of Brittany’s grades and test scores—and even
lowered
the grades of two of her daughter’s classmates. Brittany would have been the 2008 valedictorian, but a guidance counselor found a 360-point discrepancy in the school’s record of her SAT score. Brittany graduated, though not as valedictorian, and Caroline was convicted of unlawful use of a computer and tampering with public records. She faces seven years in prison and a $15,000 fine.

STUNNING
. LeShawn Fisher of Warr Acres, Oklahoma, insists she was just trying to reason with Bethany Lorenz, her daughter’s cheerleading coach, in Putnam City High School’s parking lot. But despite Fisher’s plea, Lorenz wouldn’t add her daughter to the team. So Fisher yelled, “Look over there!” and when the coach turned her head, Fisher zapped her on the neck with a stun gun set at 100,000 volts. Fisher’s lawyer argued that she wasn’t thinking clearly because she was on pain medication for a back injury. Fisher insists it was her “love of children” that inspired the attack. She was sentenced to five years in prison.

AWFUL.COM
. After her nine-year-old daughter got in a fight with another girl in Hauppauge, New York, in 2009, Margery Tannenbaum was so enraged that she vowed revenge. Tannenbaum, a licensed social worker, posted an ad on Craigslist: “I need a little affection. I am blond and very cute! I’ll be waiting.” The men who responded to
Lacethong23-@***.com
were actually e-mailing Tannenbaum, who replied to them with the name and phone number of her daughter’s rival. Nearly two dozen men called the little girl’s house before Tannenbaum was arrested and charged with aggravated harassment and endangering the welfare of a child. In addition, she lost her position as “room mother” at her daughter’s elementary school.

In 2009 a 10-year-old British girl placed her “moaning” grandmother for sale on eBay for 99¢
.

…AND DADDIES

Three tender moments between fathers and sons. Isn’t bonding great?

W
HAT WAS HE INKING?
During a backyard barbecue in spring 2009, Eugene Ashley, 24, of Floyd County, Georgia, decided that his three-year-old son needed a tattoo. So Ashley (who had been drinking heavily) fetched his tattoo gun and got to work inking the shoulder of his toddler (who was crying heavily). Neither the boy’s mother nor the Floyd police were amused by Eugene’s antics. “You keep thinking you’ve seen everything,” said the arresting officer, “and then,
voilà!”
Eugene was charged with child cruelty and lost custody of his son—who now sports a tattoo that reads “Daddy’s Boy.”

DESIGNATED DODO
. A 41-year-old father from Clio, Michigan, was too drunk to drive one night in 2007, so he gave the keys to his 13-year-old son. A patrolman later found them in a park with their pickup truck stuck in the mud. The officer gave the father a breathalyzer test. He failed and was cited for DUI. But then the officer noticed that the boy didn’t look quite right, either…and administered a second test. The son turned out to be just as drunk as the father, and was also charged with a DUI.

THE BIG LIGUES
. In September 2002, 34-year-old William Ligue Jr. and his 15-year-old son, William III, were attending a Kansas City Royals baseball game. Standing 25 feet away from them on the infield was Tom Gamboa, the Royals’ 54-year-old first-base coach. For some reason, the Ligues—both shirtless—jumped the fence and rushed Gamboa during a play. “It felt like a football team hit me from behind,” Gamboa said. “Next thing I knew, I’m on the ground trying to defend myself.” The Ligues pounded the hapless coach until players in the dugout rushed out and broke up the scuffle. Father and son were led away in handcuffs. And to this day, it’s still the proudest moment in young William III’s life (judging from how much he brags about it on his MySpace page). More good news: “I’m expectin’ a little shorty.” Watch out world, here comes William IV!

The American Psychiatric Assn. lists four different caffeine-related mental disorders
.

ELF SCHOOL