Cholera Statue under Protest

Charlottesville, VA: Infectious disease physician Louie Lime is on a controversial mission.

Throughout the South stand relics of a bygone era, monuments and memorials dedicated to now vanquished diseases. He wants to tear them down.

“They belong in a museum, not in prominent parks and intersections. It’s asinine—the MRSA statue in Montgomery still infects sickly patients in Pasteur Park, but I don’t see them casting a bronze statue of antibiotics instead. I understand that MRSA is associated with cutting down the weak, sickly, and disadvantaged among us, but we are one united country, not divided between those who max out their health insurance every year and those who don’t.”

More to the protestors at hand, cholera still reminds them of their heritage. As one anonymous germophile reported: “I have memories as a child of computer lab, before the Internet, and the only game we could play was Oregon Trail. I lost so many family members to cholera and dysentery, that those diseases have a special place in my heart. The monument reminds me to only drink clean water, or I’ll get diarrhea and shrivel up. It belongs here, not in Atlanta in some dusty hallway of CDC.”

Dr. Lime retorted, “Perhaps if the statue showed the horrors cholera represents, you know, like a murky fountain or something, we’d be ok with that. But I don’t care how noble of a disease it is, stretching back millennia. The truth is, with cholera you sit on a toilet and die unless we give you enough IV fluids.”

If prior history is any indication, Dr. Lime will be successful in his campaign. Just last month, a prominent polio monument was moved to Jenny McCarthy’s house over the protests of Antiva and other anti-vaccination groups, who tried to protect the statue with incantations, homeopathic remedies, and an ultimately futile barrier of essential oils.

When asked what his next move would be if the cholera monument came down, Dr. Lime stated, “It’s time to move on to Stage 2. Hospitals. Every hospital in this country built during a time when physicians subjugated nurses and expected them to be subservient and wear those silly little hats must be torn down.”

Reporter: Dripping Ether