WASHINGTON (May 14) - First there was the girl who fell off
her bike fleeing a flying cicada. Then a boy trying to swat
a cicada out of the air with a baseball bat instead hit his
friend in the nose.
The final straw came when another child hurt his hand trying
to squish a cicada under a car's tires. Dr. Ray Baker of
Cincinnati Children's Hospital was convinced -- cicadas can
be a safety hazard to children.
Starting this week and lasting into June, billions and
possibly even trillions of cicadas will emerge across much
of the eastern half of the United States.
The thumb-sized insects are harmless, but they are large,
noisy and clumsy. They climb out of their underground homes
en masse after 17 years of slow development with only one
goal in mind -- finding a mate.
The last time this happened at such a scale was in 1987, and
Baker was working in the emergency room of Cincinnati
Children's.
"We just noticed when this all started, children were coming
in and having injuries related to cicadas," Baker said in a
telephone interview.
Baker further commented that steps would be immediately
taken to develop an emergency vaccine to innoculate the
children against the cicadas. Baker said that the 3 billion
dollar program along with public service announcements
should afford approximately 17 years of immunity.
He concluded by stating that the vaccine would not be
cultured on renal tissue of SV + rhesus monkeys because he
didn't want to [censored] Carey and David off by giving thousands
of people lymphoma and brain tumors.