Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

Fishes

This is a public service announcement. I've been known to warn the two visitors who can read (I assume that our several thousand other visitors thought this was a porn site.) about nascent dangers in our environment; and here I am, doing it again.

There is something about fish that bothers me. I've written, tongue-in-cheek, about avoiding the fishmongers in the West Side Market because the merchants arrange the fish so that all of them are looking at me -- and I know that many of them are still alive, filled with evil intent.

For the past few years, an epidemic has been raging across the Great Lakes and elsewhere, killing massive quantities of fish. Scientists are claiming that there is no danger to me, a human, even if I eat an infected fish. Do you want to eat an infected fish, a fish infected with viral hemorrhagic septicemia? There's no cure for it, by the way. No vaccine. No drugs.

But they say it's no danger to humans; so, don't worry if you caught your dinner out on Lake Erie or the Puget Sound or off Nova Scotia or in any of the Great Lakes. And viral hemorrhagic septicemia has killed fish in inland lakes in Wisconsin and Michigan. And just yesterday, it was discovered in an inland lake in Ohio. Just remember, though, as you bite into that aquatic delight you caught or which is being presented to you at your favorite seafood restaurant, scientists say that you don't have to worry about a thing.

Oh, I almost forgot -- viral hemorrhagic septicemia is highly contagious. But that's only in fish.

Except that after eating the fish, you have a virus in your body -- I'm sure that the first person with avian flu, bird flu, was told not to worry, too -- and who knows what that bullet-shaped itty-bitty thing "with a single-stranded, negative-sense RNA genome approximately 11,000 nucleotides in length" can do when let loose in the human body. There are "six genes that code for five structural proteins needed to construct the infectious virus particle and one non-virion protein of unknown function."

Unknown function?

We don't know what that thing, that gene of unknown function, does; but it's not harmful to humans, even if you eat it, and even though it's in the same genetic family as rabies, which, by the way, the CDC considers universally fatal [Oh, yeah, you could get a preexposure vaccination or postexposure prophylaxis, but once you start salivating profusely (read that as "foaming at the mouth"), it's lights out in three to four weeks.].

So, I'm going to continue to avoid eating Atlantic Cod, Black Crappie, Bluegill, Bluntnose Minnow, Brown Bullhead, Brown Trout, Burbot, Channel Catfish, Chinook Salmon, Coho Salmon, Chum Salmon, Emerald Shiner, Freshwater Drum, Gizzard Shad, Grayling, Haddock, Herring, Japanese Flounder, Largemouth Bass, Muskellunge, Pacific Cod, Pike, Pink Salmon, Pumpkinseed, Rainbow Trout, Redhorse Sucker, Rock Bass, Rockling, Round Goby, Smallmouth Bass, Sprat, Turbot, Walleye, White Bass, White Perch, Whitefish, and Yellow Perch.

I don't care what those pesky scientists say. Viruses have been known to mutate -- unless you don't believe in evolution.

Posted by Bill at June 5, 2008 09:37 AM