meehawl

all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned

Skid Row Cooties

by ·

Image Detective Tricia Hauck finished a burglary investigation at Pete’s Café and returned to the Central Division station near Skid Row. Her left foot started to feel uncomfortably warm. She wondered if it had anything to do with an ankle fracture she suffered on vacation in Mexico a few months earlier. Within a half hour, the warm feeling turned into pain so excruciating that her leg went numb. Unable to walk, the 39-year-old burglary-investigations supervisor was carried to a patrol car and rushed by her partner to an emergency room. An MRI detected fluid around her bone. Later that day, a surgeon cut into her foot and removed an abscess. The diagnosis: Skid Row staph [MRSA]. Cops are so accustomed to seeing people with oozing boils that they call them Skid Row cooties … Skid Row [has] become a giant petri dish … Nearly 1,500 homeless people living and sleeping on the streets, with little or no access to proper hygiene, soap or warm water, make it an ideal breeding ground for the bacteria.

Leave a Reply