{"id":9247,"date":"2025-04-16T12:38:04","date_gmt":"2025-04-16T17:38:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=9247"},"modified":"2025-04-16T12:38:07","modified_gmt":"2025-04-16T17:38:07","slug":"do-you-have-your-cootie-shot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2025\/04\/16\/do-you-have-your-cootie-shot\/","title":{"rendered":"Do You Have Your Cootie Shot?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Atlantic<\/a> The classic kids\u2019 game teaches a lesson about public health that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has failed to learn. A sudden and mysterious outbreak of communicable disease began recently in my apartment building in Manhattan. Three 7-year-olds, a boy and two girls, were sharing the elevator one day with a caretaker and a random adult (me). The boy was leaning against the back of the elevator, between the two girls. \u201cHelp! I\u2019m in a girl sandwich,\u201d he said. \u201cIf I\u2019m not careful, I\u2019m going to get cooties!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cKids still play Cooties?\u201d I asked, surprised that cooties were not a relic of my Boomer childhood but had endured into the 21st century, still sparking alarm, feigned or real, among the young. \u201cYeah-huh,\u201d the boy said. One of the girls piped up: \u201cI know how to give a cootie shot.\u201d She demonstrated on her own shoulder, her technique a bit of a blur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

he kids and their caretaker got off on their floor, leaving me to ponder the cootie phenomenon for the first time in many decades. Beyond being amused, I was struck by the morbid salience of a children\u2019s game that mimics infection at a time when vaccine skepticism is on the rise and an outbreak of a non-pretend disease, measles, is threatening the lives of children in the Southwest. I learned that there is a vibrant if slender slice of academic literature on \u201cpreadolescent cootie lore,\u201d as one scholar puts it, and that this goofy grade-school fixation is more closely tied to real public-health concerns than you might think if your cootie expertise derives only from the playground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What exactly are<\/em> cooties? Since at least the 1960s, field researchers have collected definitions of varying specificity from grammar-school respondents: \u201cboys\u2019 germs,\u201d \u201cgirls\u2019 germs,\u201d \u201csomething that kills you,\u201d \u201clike germs, it has germs on it,\u201d \u201cwhere somebody licks the bottom of the chair or eats paper.\u201d Other experts speak of cooties in more anthropological terms. The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee folklorist Simon J. Bronner has characterized cooties as a \u201critualized affliction.\u201d In their seminal 1976 book, One Potato, Two Potato: The Folklore of American Children<\/em><\/a>, Herbert and Mary Knapp described cooties as a kind of sport. \u201cThere are no supervised Cootie leagues, but more people in the United States have played Cooties than have played baseball, basketball, and football combined,\u201d they wrote. \u201cIt\u2019s our unofficial national game.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Atlantic The classic kids\u2019 game teaches a lesson about public health that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has failed to learn. A sudden and mysterious outbreak of communicable disease began recently in my apartment building in Manhattan. Three 7-year-olds, a boy and two girls, were sharing the elevator one day with a caretaker and a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychological-and-sociological-impact"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9247"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9248,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9247\/revisions\/9248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}