Occasionally, the government asks us for help in its thankless task to reduce the unintended collateral damage caused by good-hearted, but busy, medical professionals.

There it was lying on my plate in front of me, a dead chicken. That was when the idea struck me, a method to easily solve the whole bird flu ‘get-ready-because-it’s-coming-for-sure’ pandemic. Well, partially anyway. I lifted my fork for another bite of the perfectly cooked, savory fowl. Delicious.

Archaeologists have always been known to check the waste of societies for important clues about life. Now they’ve got company. A recent news article, describing new activity by government scientists, caught my eye. These federal investigators in white coats have developed a taste for waste-testing. They have begun the fascinating task of studying America’s wastewater, intent on finding out just how much cocaine people might be snarfling up their noses.

American medicine was publicly flogged recently because life expectancy in our country falls below that of most wealthy nations. This is totally unfair. I don’t think we should blame the medical industry for our lifespan. Medicine in the United States is doing everything in its power to fight death. Heck, we spend twice as much per person on medical care than any other country.

The “father of fluoridation,” Dr. Trendley Dean assured everyone in the 1930s and 1940s that the addition of fluoride to water was “safe and effective,” even “necessary” for strong bones and teeth. Dr. Dean later gave courtroom testimony on two separate occasions that his original claims were based on invalid statistics. Perhaps we are now in a position to realize that “safe and effective” is a powerful secret code used by captains of American industry in place of a different term, “hideously toxic.”