Dr. Dixon and the Deadly Dishes

(or, a tale of two piggies)

If you read this Friday’s Notes — especially the first eight of them — you know that the Chicken Little response to the Porky Pig flu has me at my wit’s, if not yet my elbow’s, end. As if on cue, and almost as if he’s testing the limits to which my head will expand before it finally explodes, Greg Victor, the PG’s great Op-Ed editor, serves up a Forum piece by Charlie Stewart, a local father who concludes that there’s just nothing funny about the Swine Flu, remembers how hard it is to take care of someone who’s sick, and professes that he’s now so paranoid he can’t even touch a doorknob anymore.

Whether this is a personal choice, or a consequence of writing from inside a padded cell, he does not explain. But I have my suspicions. And they were confirmed right about the time he declared that when his son was sick, he washed the dishes with the hottest water he could handle, then ran them through the dishwasher twice.

Presumably Mr. Stewart did not throw them away, or bury them in his backyard, or perhaps chain them in a sack, drive them to a quarry, and hurl them into the deep black water below, for fear that their spirits might one day rise and return as porcine poltergeists or flesh-eating, Purell-resistant pig zombies. Someone should ask him. Or perhaps check with his Exorcist.

In stark — and I do mean stark — contrast to Mr. Stewart’s derangement comes another, happier reflection of Friday’s Notes: a wonderful piece by Michael A. Fuoco on Dr. Bruce Dixon, long-time Director of the Allegheny County Health Department. It’s a great read, and a vivid portrait of a man held in high esteem not just by those who value sense and reason and perspective and proportion in their public health pronouncements, but by anyone fortunate enough to know, or to have benefited from, the good doctor’s work.

Think about it: that’s not just eighteen years of selfless and honorable service to his community; it’s eighteen years of talking down and setting straight the Charlie Stewarts of the world when they think that an acid bath and a Tamiflu enema are the only things standing between them and grim and certain sniffles.