The Yankees Want To Kill You

Skin cancer will cause the deaths of 7,000 Americans this year, and maybe more if the most evil team in baseball has its way:

Yankee fans are seeing — and turning — red over a ban on sunscreen, which Stadium security guards say was widely expanded in the last few weeks.

Security guards collected garbage bags full of sunblock at the entrances to Yankee Stadium over the sweltering weekend, when temps hit 96 degrees and the UV index reached a skin-scorching 9 out of 10 — a move team officials said was to protect the Stadium from terrorism.

But fans baking in the bleachers and upper deck argued that the sun may be a bigger threat than Osama bin Laden.

“I was really pissed because, since I am Irish and I have a bald head, I need my sunblock,” said Sean Gavin, 40, who had to toss his SPF 30 at the gate Saturday.

“After they saw me dousing myself with it, it should have been obvious to them that it was sunblock and not some explosive.”

. . .

Four weeks ago, Stadium officials decided that sunscreen of all sizes and varieties would not be permitted, a security supervisor told The Post before last night’s game.

“There have been a lot of complaints,” he said. “We tell them to apply once and then throw it out.”

For fans who bring babies or young children to cheer on the home team, the guard had suggested they “beg” to take the sunblock in.

. . .

The Stadium does sell 1-ounce bottles of Arizona Sun SPF 15 for $5 — a huge markup that makes its beer seem cheap.

Dermatologists said that, security concerns or not, leaving 56,000 fans unprotected from potential skin cancer is “very dangerous.”

“This is especially bad for children, as their younger skin is particularly sensitive,” said Dr. Babar Rao, a specialist at the Skin and Cancer Center of New York. “Sunblock needs to be reapplied every two hours, even if you are not swimming in the ocean or pool.”

Major League Baseball even has a skin-cancer prevention program called “Play Sun Smart.”

An hour after being asked about the sunscreen ban, Yankee spokesman Jason Zillo told The Post that the rules would be changed to permit 3-ounce containers.

(And MLB doesn’t just have a namby-pamby “program” to battle skin cancer — it’s actually one of Commissioner Bud Selig’s pet projects, Selig himself diagnosed with skin cancer in 2004.)

Good Art Provokes . . .

. . . better art nearly drowns and kills:

A pair of kayakers who paddled too close to the New York City Waterfalls installation under the Brooklyn Bridge nearly drowned when swift currents and the falls’ suction mechanism capsized their boat, police said.

“I wanted to get a closer look at the waterfalls, and then it sucked us in,” said Vladimer Spector, 37, one of the two men plucked from the East River by the NYPD Harbor Patrol.

He and Bert Rosenblatt, 36, were part of a group of real estate developers who left Red Hook for a tour of the falls with the nonprofit Long Island City Community Boathouse.

As they approached the waterfall, they started to lose control of their boat, police said.

“They were too enthralled with the waterfalls,” said John McGarvey, one of the outing’s coordinators.

By the time the pair realized the power of the water, it was too late.

“I lost my shoes because the current was so strong,” said Rosenblatt, who lives in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, and owns Vicus Partners on Madison Ave. “My life didn’t flash before my eyes or anything like that, but I was definitely scared.”

The falls were turned off for 15 minutes during the rescue.

Visit The New Website, ReadyToFreakOut.gov

Now that we’re prepared for a devastating Category 4 or 5 hurricane (right? right?), we can look forward to the next great disaster — a flu pandemic that will surely kill hundreds of thousands of city residents:

Be afraid, be very afraid. There is no telling what the next disaster will be. Another terrorist attack? A steam pipe explosion like the one that shut down several blocks of Lexington Avenue a year ago? Or perhaps a pandemic flu that would cripple New York City’s economy by making people afraid to go to work or ride on subways and buses?

That was the message at a daylong workshop conducted on Tuesday by the city’s health and emergency management agencies, intended to give businesses tips on how to cope with the potential calamities.

The workshop had all the portentous, overwrought atmosphere of movies about how the world is coming to an end and everyone had better be ready, from “War of the Worlds” to the latest M. Night Shyamalan film. Only in this faux disaster, the participants — some of whom have spent years immersing themselves in the subject — were treating it with deadly earnestness.

The possibility of an influenza pandemic was the disaster du jour. Dr. Isaac B. Weisfuse, the city’s deputy health commissioner for disease control, told an audience of about 300 business people that since history repeats itself, he considers it likely that there will be a worldwide outbreak of flu, possibly a mutation of the current avian flu, sometime in the 21st century, just as there were killer disease epidemics in virtually every other century.

“Everybody in the whole state — local governments, businesses large and small, families — should be preparing,” Dr. Weisfuse told the gathering at New York University.

Just as Americans built bomb shelters and stocked them with crackers during the Cold War, the city has been stockpiling supplies to combat pandemic flu, Dr. Weisfuse assured his audience. He announced that 25 million surgical face masks — known as P.P.E.’s, short for “personal protective equipment” — are secreted in a New York City warehouse.

“I’m very proud of this collection,” Dr. Weisfuse said, showing a slide of the rows upon rows of boxed-up masks, like the treasure in an Indiana Jones movie. “We have more face masks than you could ever imagine.”

But, still not enough. The stockpile is equal to three for each of the city’s eight million residents, and epidemiologists recommend changing those face masks twice a day. “Look at all these lovely boxes,” Dr. Weisfuse said. “They’re going to be empty after about a day and a half of pandemic.”

(One audience member, who said he managed a 42-story residential high-rise, wondered how many microns of particle size the mask should be able to guard against. Dr. Weisfuse replied, in essence, that it does not mater, because the masks are so loose that some germs are bound to escape from the sides.)

Caveat Pleasure

Counterfeit Louis Vuitton handbags, sure. But counterfeit condoms, too? Not to sound harsh, but if you’re cheap enough to buy condoms at a 99-cent store, you probably deserve what you get:

Careful with those Trojan brand condoms from the discount store. They may not be the real thing.

Same with the Barbie doll and the Louis Vuitton handbag.

In raids in the metropolitan area yesterday, federal agents arrested at least eight people and charged them with heading a counterfeit products ring. Authorities say the ring has been smuggling into the country and then distributing massive quantities of fake brand-name goods manufactured in China, including Apple iPods, Major League Baseball and National Football League caps and Marvel comic books.

The counterfeits, which included millions of the phony Trojans, were sold for the past three years mainly in small discount stores in the area, as well as elsewhere in the country, including Texas and Virginia, according to court documents.

A spokeswoman for Church and Dwight, the company that manufactures the legitimate Trojan condoms in the United States, declined to comment on whether the counterfeit Chinese condoms could fail to prevent pregnancies or the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

But a source familiar with the federal investigation said that while the counterfeit condoms were of inferior quality, samples had been tested and they were no riskier to use than legitimate ones.

The packaging of the Chinese condoms is almost identical to the legitimate ones, except that the counterfeit packaging is plastic, while the legitimate product is packaged in aluminum foil, said another source familiar with the investigation. “They [the counterfeiters] spent all their money on printing,” said the source.

Reassuring Thought Of The Day

It may be impossible to hop on an E train to safety:

The city’s plan to get people out of the path of a hurricane might make anyone uncomfortable who remembers Aug. 8, 2007.

That’s when three inches of rain came down in one hour and flooding shut down the subway.

“We would use our mass-transit system to evacuate the majority of people,” said Amy Schultz of the Office of Emergency Management at a City Council hearing yesterday.

An OEM brochure offers the same advice: “If the city issues an evacuation order . . . use public transportation if possible.”

That might not be possible. After last August’s meltdown, MTA chief Eliot Sander said the subway can handle only about an inch and a half of rain in an hour.

A major storm would “severely” affect the subway, Schultz acknowledged, but the evacuation would begin early, perhaps days before the storm.

“We’ve worked out the timing,” she said. “We have to ensure there’s enough time so the subway can be shut down.” Trains would not run during a hurricane.

August 8, 2007 . . . oh yeah, that sucked.