There's nothing more toxic or deadly than a human child. A single touch could kill you.

New Rule: Instead of killing 99.9 percent of germs, Lysol has to just go ahead and kill them all. Why spare the remaining 0.1 percent? So they can return to their villages and tell the other germs, "Dude, do not mess with Lysol"?

Beyond the cultural differences that must be bridged in any international effort, combined with factors of national politics, priorities, and values, we continue to grapple with the essential paradox of public health that began our discussion: when the system is working effectively, it is a silent venture and there are relatively few outbreaks of disease. These very successes lead most of us down a complacent path of false confidence, apathy, and assumptions that the endless dance is over. To complicate matters further, microbes themselves are hardly monolithic or permanently settled beings. For every attempt we make to destroy or weaken them, they respond with an equal and opposite force. The goal of both sides is to assume leadership of the evolutionary waltz ever in progress.

Frowning, she warmed up the scone she’d saved for Callum. “I could get a pop-up camper to pull behind my truck. When I get a truck, of course. That way, I could move my house every few days and experience different views.”

“You’re not living in a camper.” He bit into the scone and chewed angrily.

“Excuse me.” The female half of the eavesdropping couple took a step closer to the counter. “Are there any more of those scones?”

Lou pasted a regretful smile on her face. “Sorry, no. This was the last one.”

“I didn’t see it in the display.” The woman scowled. “I specifically asked if you had any scones, and you said you were out.”

“I had to hold this one back. It was defective.”

“Defective?” Her eyes darted between Lou’s expression of fake sympathy and the small bite of scone Callum hadn’t eaten yet. “It looked fine.”

“I licked it.” Lou heard Callum choke on the last piece of scone, but she couldn’t look at him or she would start laughing. If his airway was blocked, he was going to have to give himself the Heimlich.

The woman’s suspicious expression didn’t ease. “Why did you let him eat it then?”

“Oh, his tongue is in my mouth all the time,” Lou said sweetly, and Callum’s coughing increased. “I didn’t think he’d mind my germs.”

With a sound of frustration, the woman stormed out of the shop, followed closely by the male half of the couple. The bells rang merrily as the door closed behind them, as if celebrating their absence.

“Sparks,” Callum rasped once his coughing died down. “You’re going to kill me.”

“But what a way to go.”

“True.” Grabbing her hand, he pulled her closer and leaned across the counter. “Now give me some of those germs.

The troops and their ladies had first drunk champagne. There were also remains of sandwiches, and I stepped on one, which I think was either cucumber or watercress. I scraped it off on the curbing, left it there for germs. I'll tell you this, though: No germ is going to leave the Solar System eating sissy stuff like that.
Plutonium! Now there's the stuff to put hair on a microbe's chest.

I was afraid of anyone in a costume. A trip to see Santa might as well have been a trip to sit on Hitler's lap for all the trauma it would cause me. Once, when I was four, my mother and I were in a Sears and someone wearing an enormous Easter Bunny costume headed my way to present me with a chocolate Easter egg. I was petrified by this nightmarish six-foot-tall bipedal pink fake-fur monster with human-sized arms and legs and a soulless, impassive face heading toward me. It waved halfheartedly as it held a piece of candy out in an evil attempt to lure me into its clutches. Fearing for my life, I pulled open the bottom drawer of a display case and stuck my head inside, the same way an ostrich buries its head in the sand. This caused much hilarity among the surrounding adults, and the chorus of grown-up laughter I heard echoing from within that drawer only added to the horror of the moment. Over the next several years, I would run away in terror from a guy in a gorilla suit whose job it was to wave customers into a car wash, a giant Uncle Sam on stilts, a midget dressed like a leprechaun, an astronaut, the Detroit Tigers mascot, Ronald McDonald, Big Bird, Bozo the Clown, and every Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto, Chip and Dale, Uncle Scrooge, and Goofy who walked the streets at Disneyland. Add to this an irrational fear of small dogs that saw me on more than one occasion fleeing in terror from our neighbor's four-inch-high miniature dachschund as if I were being chased by the Hound of the Baskervilles and a chronic case of germ phobia, and it's pretty apparent that I was--what some of the less politically correct among us might call--a first-class pussy.