The Worst — No, Really The Worst

An orthodox mohel — not even the same one! — has given two more babies herpes and now the City is trying to “educate” parents about the risk of having some random 80-year-old geezer with cold sores suckle their baby’s cut penis. I’m all for religious tolerance, but this is just horrible:

Two more babies have contracted herpes through an ancient circumcision rite, leading the city’s top health official yesterday to release an open letter to the city’s Orthodox Jewish community urging caution.

The practice, known in Hebrew as metzitzah b’peh, involves a practitioner, or mohel, drawing blood from a child’s circumcision wound by mouth.

Last year, three baby boys — including one who died — were known to be infected with herpes during circumcisions by the same Rockland County-based rabbi, Yitzchok Fischer, who has since suspended the practice, officials said.

But two new cases of infection — neither of which appears to be connected to Fischer — have since been reported to the city, causing Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden to release his letter yesterday.

I’m not the “There-oughta-be-a-law!” type, but . . . the health department’s response seems a little, er, permissive:

The letter steered away from urging a ban on oral suction, as some have suggested, and instead focused on trying to educate families about inherent risks.

“To help protect their baby,” Frieden wrote, “parents should understand the risk of metzitzah b’peh — BEFORE the day of the [circumcision], while there is time to explore other options.”

See also: New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Before the Bris: How to Protect Your Infant Against Herpes Virus Infection Caused by metzitzah b’peh information page.

12-9

The Times’ City Section takes a closer look at the nightmarish notion of being thrown in front of a subway:

It is the dark fear of anyone who has gazed down at the subway tracks, leaned out from a platform to search the distance for a pair of headlights, or felt a sharp underground breeze kick up at the crescendoing rumble of train wheels. A trip and fall, or a loss of balance, or a sudden jolt or push from behind . . . and then a plunge, to the damp, grimy floor between the glistening rails.

Half submerged in New York’s collective unconscious, alongside dirty bombs and dark-alley robberies, is the nightmare of somehow winding up in the path of an oncoming train.

The transit workers’ union estimates that people get hit by trains at a surprising rate of one or two a week. The transit worker code for this is “12-9,” and as you can guess, it freaks out subway conductors:

“Imagine spending the whole day on that train,” a motorman named William Martinez once said in a Bronx diner near the end of the D line, his route for several years. “It’s an exercise in staying awake. I was telling somebody it’s like watching the same movie 1,000 times, but having to watch for that one detail in it that’s different every time.”

But far worse than the boredom, the numbing sameness, is the jolt that can come out of nowhere, turning lives upside down in a split second.

For Mr. Martinez, it had come in Harlem in November 2002, when a woman standing with her husband on the platform at the 125th Street/St. Nicholas Avenue station abruptly started running toward the edge, then jumped. When he saw her legs flip up into the air before she disappeared under the train, he feared the worst, but somehow she survived. He got down on the tracks and helped lift her out from between the cars where she had ended up. Only later, in a meeting with two supervisors after he took his train out of service, did he feel tears on his face and realize that he could not stop shaking. Back at the control center, someone congratulated him: The delay in service was only 17 minutes.

In case you were wondering, the procedure for a 12-9 goes something like this:

Minutes after the train grinds to a halt after a 12-9, it is the train operator’s job to climb down, flashlight in hand, and inspect the tracks. The logic is that the operator is inevitably among the first people on the scene, and whoever is under the train could still be alive and either in need of help, bruised or bleeding, or inches from the perilous third rail.

. . .

For most subway workers, the harsh side of the job is not something they bargain for.

But then somebody jumps in front of a train, or is pushed, or gets sick and falls to the roadbed after drinking too much or missing breakfast. Most riders do not even notice, because subway workers have become so efficient at cleanup. First, trains are rerouted out of the area. Next, all the body parts are gathered. Finally, because the blood cannot be wiped up so easily, workers put down an absorbent layer of sand. If the scene is right, and the weather isn’t too cold, the blood dries up. In time, the sand drifts away, carried off on the breezes that flow through the tunnels day and night.

It’s Endemic, Pandemic, This Epidemic

The Times follows up on the bedbug scourge, reported last spring in the New Yorker (Bug Off Pest Control Center proprietor Andy Linares is perfecting his soundbites!), and finds that it has only gotten worse:

They’re the scourge of hobo encampments and hot-sheet motels. To impressionable children everywhere, they’re a snippet of nursery rhyme, an abstract foe lurking beneath the covers that emerges when mommy shuts the door at night.

But bedbugs on Park Avenue? Ask the horrified matron who recently found her duplex teeming with the blood-sucking beasts. Or the tenants of a co-op on Riverside Drive who spent $200,000 earlier this month to purge their building of the pesky little thugs. The Helmsley Park Lane was sued two years ago by a welt-covered guest who blamed the hotel for harboring the critters. The suit was quietly settled last year.

And bedbugs, stealthy and fast-moving nocturnal creatures that were all but eradicated by DDT after World War II, have recently been found in hospital maternity wards, private schools and even a plastic surgeon’s waiting room.

Bedbugs are back and spreading through New York City like a swarm of locusts on a lush field of wheat.

To make matters worse, there’s nothing we can do to stop them:

“It’s becoming an epidemic,” said Jeffrey Eisenberg, the owner of Pest Away Exterminating, an Upper West Side business that receives about 125 bedbug calls a week, compared with just a handful five years ago. “People are being tortured, and so am I. I spend half my day talking to hysterical people about bedbugs.”

Last year the city logged 377 bedbug violations, up from just 2 in 2002 and 16 in 2003. Since July, there have been 449. “It’s definitely a fast-emerging problem,” said Carol Abrams, spokeswoman for the city housing agency.

In the bedbug resurgence, entomologists and exterminators blame increased immigration from the developing world, the advent of cheap international travel and the recent banning of powerful pesticides. Other culprits include the recycled mattress industry and those thrifty New Yorkers who revel in the discovery of a free sofa on the sidewalk.

And that new mattress delivered from a reputable department store, which kindly hauled away your old one? It may have spent all day in a truck wedged against an old mattress collected from a customer with a bedbug problem.

Once introduced into a home, bedbugs can crawl into adjoining apartments or hitch a ride to another part of town in the cuff of a pant leg.

And now the Times adds a twist — we can now blame bedbugs for more of society’s ills, including licentiousness:

Kellianne Scanlan, 30, a hairstylist who lives in Washington Heights, has been living like a nomad since last month, when she spotted a bedbug on her pillow, and then whole families ensconced in the frame of her platform bed. Despite the visit of an exterminator, the problem has not been vanquished, and every last item of clothing is sealed in plastic bags and piled up on the living room floor.

“My life has become all about bedbugs,” she said as an exterminator arrived last week.

. . .

“The psychological damage is probably the worst thing about it. I mean, how long will it be before I can sleep soundly and not worry about some creature sucking my blood?”

Still, for Ms. Scanlan, there has been a silver lining. The night after she discovered the bugs, she went out drinking, intent on avoiding her own bed. That evening she met a man at a bar, and, contrary to her usual instincts, accompanied him to his apartment.

It’s Not A Sandwich, It’s A . . . A Big, Disgusting Sandwich!

Unintended consequences: Carnegie Deli sandwiches proved excessive by a team of sumo wrestlers — some over 600 pounds:

At only 245 pounds, Levan Altunashvilli was the lightest of the 14 men who clambered off a minivan at the Carnegie Deli in Midtown yesterday and was served a Woody Allen.

For the record, a Woody Allen is an enormous pastrami and corned beef sandwich on rye bread that was named for someone who weighs a little more than half of what Mr. Altunashvilli weighs and who is pretty much the physical opposite of what Mr. Altunashvilli is: a sumo wrestler.

But the Woody Allen, with two pounds of meat, was too much lunch for Mr. Altunashvilli. “I eat like everybody,” he said between bites, “only I eat four or five times a day.”

With 14 sumo wrestlers together at lunch, there were biceps that jiggled and stomachs that flopped over waistbands. There was even shirt removal – Oni pa’a Imua Pa’a’aina, who is from Hawaii and weighs 450 pounds, stripped to the waist. Anything to keep from spilling ketchup on a white sweatshirt.

Yes, Virginia! Not all sumo wrestlers indulge in two pounds of cold cuts at one time:

The wrestlers said they did not mind being the center of a spectacle as they signed napkins for autograph-seekers who had never heard of them. “It’s marketing,” said Hans Borg, 324 pounds, from Norway. “It’s good for the sport.”

This was after he had pushed himself away from the table, saying, “Can’t finish. An athlete can’t eat this much pork meat.”

. . .

Ronny Allman, who weighs 286 pounds and is from Norway, had a more varied lunch in mind: “A couple of eggs, three or four slices of bread, a little meat.” He said he puts away 10,000 calories a day, in installments.

“We like food,” he said. But putting down his knife and fork and leaving about half of his Woody Allen behind, he said, “This is too much to eat at one time. You’d get sick.”

Thank You For Not Snitching

The Times reports that “No Snitching” t-shirts are selling like hot cakes on 125th Street:

It started with a dozen T-shirts, emblazoned with bright red stop signs. Now the shirts come in eight colors and three styles, all with the same basic message: Stop snitching.

In Harlem, where the shirts are made, the slogan seems to resonate with some residents. “A lot of people tell the police something, it just creates more problems,” said Andrew Gonzalez, 17, explaining his oversize “No Snitching Anytime” shirt one recent afternoon.

Keashia Williams, 15, who was wearing a black baby-T and had just bought another in white, added, “Black people shouldn’t snitch on black people.”

Her younger sister, Teneshia, interpreted the message more bluntly: “You snitch, you die.”

That credo gained popularity late last year, when a “Stop Snitching” DVD hit the streets of Baltimore, with images of young men brandishing guns and threatening suspected police informants by name. The grainy video made the news thanks to a brief cameo by a young National Basketball Association star, Carmelo Anthony, who later apologized, and the arrest of three participants on drug charges. The Baltimore police were quick to denounce it, and countered with a DVD of their own, called “Keep Talking.”

Meanwhile, exact sales data is not yet available for “Thank You For Not Snitching” shirts, which head shops in suburban Tri-State communities have begun selling.