Student participate in National Novel Writing Month

Many folks never consider writing a novel. Even less would consider taking on such a daunting task in a month. But there are a select few that choose to take on this challenge every November. These are the people of the National Novel Writing Month, or the “NaNoWriMo”, which takes place every year in November. As the website so kindly puts it, it is “thirty days and nights of literary abandon!” There really is no other way to put it, because when you have a month to write a 50,000 word novel, you are abandoning everything but writing.

Participants of NaNoWriMo, affectionally known as Nano, such as CHS freshman Emily Lovett, are kind enough to warn new writers of the stress.

“Note that it is impossible to get balance on everything in your life during NaNoWriMo, i.e. social life, grades, sleep, and extra-curricular activities,” Lovett said, a second year participant. “I have cut two of these, sleep and social life. So if you saw me walking around like a zombie, that’s why.”

The novels can be about anything. Participants are free to choose any fictional genre, although all characters must be original and you may not start writing before midnight on Nov. 1. However, you are allowed to outline your novel, which sometimes helps to ease the stress.
CHS sophomore Rilke Griffin, is writing a novel in one month for the second time.

“My novel is about an author whose daughter and husband died in an accident that was partially her fault,” Griffin said. “It is written in the form of letters to her daughter, and it’s about how she came to be a well-known author and all of her misadventures during that time.”

While the name of the event is National Novel Writing Month, it is actually international. Hayley Smith, an author from Lancashire, England, is a second time participant in NaNoWriMo. She won last year and has reached the 50,000 word mark by mid-November this year, although she is still working on her novel.
Many people debate over the hardest part of a novel. While it’s different for every person, oftentimes relatively simple things are the hardest.

“I think [the hardest part about writing a novel] is actually getting the words on the page for me. I have the novel waiting to be written, but I find that I can’t get it down quickly enough. It frustrates me, and I often just want to scrap the whole thing,” Smith said, who is ready to win again this year. “Getting the ideas down is easy in my opinion, but putting them down in some form of order that makes sense is what I struggle with the most.”

While NaNoWriMo is very rewarding, it is definitely a lot of work. Smith believes that the effort is worth it.

“Despite all the stress, the pain, and immense amount of caffeine consumed, [NaNoWriMo] is amazing, and should be tried at least once by all writers,” said Smith.
However, some students wonder if this is a task students should undertake.

“Honestly, unless you want your grades and social life to suffer, I would wait until you are out of high school, college, and a member of normal society,” Griffin said. “I do it [now] because I am completely obsessed with writing.”

(Photo by: Paul Lisker)

Anyone who has yet to watch one episode of either show is sorely missing out. They are among the best sitcoms – may I even go so far as to say the best shows? – on Earth.

“Friends” is about, as the title so illustriously says, a group of friends. This includes fashionable Rachel, geeky Ross, eccentric Phoebe, airheaded Joey, bossy Monica, and sardonic Chandler. Together, they act as one hilarious, dysfunctional family, even though they all live separate lives. Everyday occurrences become comical stretches of time and the viewer gets to know the characters really well.

Upon first glance, “Friends” may seem like a show lacking any substance. Actually, it probably is, if a person does not delve into the depths of the characters’ souls, but then, that can be true of any show.

Each character’s quirks add to the funniness of each episode. I don’t think any given episode would be as funny if the directors cut out Monica vacuuming a vacuum or Joey and Chandler’s weird but understandable love for Duck, Jr., and Chick, Jr.

Combine the characters’ peculiarities with their awkward romances – Ross and Rachel, anyone? – and everyday interactions, a person ends up watching side-splitting antics.

Of course, “Friends” could never compare to “Everybody Loves Raymond”. “Everybody Loves Raymond” is basically the epitome of an enjoyable sitcom.

“Everybody Loves Raymond” is about Raymond (of course), his wife Deborah, his kids, and his parents, and his brother; but mostly, it’s all about Raymond.

Even though his mother, Marie, pampered Raymond like a prince while completely ignoring his older brother Robert, his father, Frank, was cold and distant when Raymond was a child.

But there’s more. Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, it is revealed that Frank, Marie, and Robert continuously barge in his home, because all three live right across the street from him.

Everybody who loves Raymond in the show makes up one completely, ridiculously dysfunctional family. The show wouldn’t be the same without Marie and Deborah’s constant contesting for Raymond’s attention, Raymond and Robert’s sibling rivalry, or Frank’s odd habits.

Just watching the Barone family’s behavior is enough to laugh out loud. It’s not everyday that I get invited into another family’s house to watch them live in a way that can make me keel over with laughter.

Sure, maybe it seems a bit odd that, as a teenager, I am watching old ‘90s sitcoms instead of “90210” or “Gossip Girl”. But, I highly recommend watching these two shows to get a hearty laugh.

Turn on the TV and start laughing.

The minerals, called the “3Ts and gold” by Enough, are factors behind a conflict in the eastern Congo that has been continuing for over a decade. The conflict has resulted in over 5 million civilian deaths and an estimated 45 thousand deaths per month, according to the International Rescue Committee.

The Enough Project’s campaign called RAISE Hope for Congo strives to promote awareness of the conflict and advocate the empowerment of women and girls in the Congo. It works to educate the public, in part by collaborating with celebrities like Ryan Gosling and Ken Baumann. One of its main focuses is creating awareness of the use of conflict minerals in common electronic devices.

The war in the Congo is rooted in the end of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, a neighboring country, according to field manager John Bagwell of the Enough Project.

“There was a power-flip, and the group that was perpetrating the genocide and killing all of the people in that period of time was kicked out of power,” Bagwell said. “Many of the people that were committing the atrocities and doing the murdering in Rwanda fled next door into the Congo. So that really was the basis for how armed groups started to come in. They had experience and knowledge about how to organize and what it means to control people through fear and terror.”

Prior to the arrival of the Rwandan groups in the Congo, armed militia groups existed, but had a smaller presence. Bagwell said it was primarily a group called the FDLR from Rwanda that increased the violence that has continued from the late nineties through today.

Due to weak government and corruption within the Congolese army, armed groups are able to gain control of large areas.

“Essentially what you have is a situation where it’s just like the Wild West – it’s like the Mafia or something,” Bagwell said. “There is no rule of law, there are no consequences for raping and killing, there are no effective structures in place to hold people accountable. So it just turns into every group for itself, and that’s really led to what we see now.”

Armed groups know that regions with major mining sites mean profit because of the multi-million dollar trade surrounding conflict minerals used for electronics. As a result, militia groups target mining areas and the civilians living around them. They instill fear in the people through murder and rape, and make large profits by taxing the mining areas and trading minerals.

However, the issue of conflict minerals is not an extremely well known one.

“I think it’s a fairly new realization that the connect is so direct between the minerals that end up in cell phones and laptops and other electronics, and the war that’s going on and the financing of arms groups,” Bagwell said. “You look back on other big campaigns to change countries and dynamics and to stop wars, and it takes a long time for something that doesn’t directly affect the American people to catch on and make the connection. The blood diamond campaign took many, many years to really catch on and to be something that people had heard about and knew about and cared about.”

According to the Enough Project, the raw minerals are smuggled out of Africa and sent to Asian countries to be refined. They are mixed with minerals from other places, making it somewhat difficult for the minerals financing the conflict in Congo to be traced. However, Bagwell said that it is likely that most electronic devices contain conflict minerals.

In addition, these minerals are found in other industries such as the automotive industry, which uses large quantities of tantalum.

“We’re trying to get other industries on board, as well, so we can clean up the whole supply chain, not just for one product, but across the line, because our goal is to stop the violence,” Bagwell said.

In July, legislation was passed requiring U.S. companies to annually report to the Securities and Exchange Commission if certain minerals they use originated in the Congo or nearby countries. Companies must also report how they are preventing purchases that finance armed groups in the Congo and surrounding areas, according to the New York Times.

The legislation is the first significant step forward for activists such as those from Enough. However, Bagwell said that a way to certify products is still necessary.

“What we would like to see is a system where you are actually certifying that certain minerals coming out of Congo are not contributing to conflict,” Bagwell said. “You can buy conflict-free diamonds, you can buy organic food that you know is organic, because it’s been certified with that label. The legislation gets a good start on the tracing and the auditing for companies that use these minerals, but what it doesn’t do is that big third step, which is set up a certification system.”

In order to move toward that goal, Enough encourages people, especially young adults, to speak out against the use of conflict minerals, whether it is with a petition, protest, or letter to the government. Bagwell said that young people hold a great deal of power when it comes to creating change because electronics companies often market to teenagers the most.

Schools, as a whole, are also highly important in the movement toward conflict-free products.

“Right now it’s about voicing support for the campaign, for the intent, and for the goals that we’re trying to accomplish,” Bagwell said. “By doing that with an institutional voice, with a school-wide voice, it will have a much bigger impact than just individual consumers because of the big contracts and the relationships they hold with these companies that they purchase from.”

For the Enough Project, turning awareness into motivation for action is an important step.

“Many times when we talk about these issues we get so caught up in the practical arguments and everything, and we lose sight of the humanity and the moral aspect that people are dying everyday as a result of this conflict,” Bagwell said. “We as human beings, no matter where conflict occurs, have a responsibility to do what we can.”

Taylor Gold

However, the movie is, for the most part, only about this. The focus on her heroism isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the movie could have the potential to go much further and deeper than simply celebrating Earhart, played by Hilary Swank, as an individual and a pilot.
It opens with the end of Earhart’s career and very near to the end of her life. She is embarking on a trip to fly around the globe, something that has never before been done, especially by a woman. As she begins her flight, there is a flashback to her as a young girl growing up in Kansas, where she first grew to love the idea of the freedom of flying.
The movie then follows her career, from the first time she meets her future manager and husband, George Putnam, played by Richard Gere, to the last moment on her failed flight when she was in contact with the world. Along the way, the movie flashes forward to brief scenes on her last flight. The idea is that Earhart is reflecting on her life, particularly her love life, as she does what she loves most for the last time. Even though she does not know if she will survive the trip, she does know that she will most likely never fly again because it’s time for her career to come to a close.
In the end of the film, just as the world witnessed in 1937, Earhart’s plane disappeared somewhere in the Pacific Ocean after nearly two-thirds of her flight was completed. As the movie depicts, it was a tragic loss for many around the world, but in particular her husband.
Much of the scenery throughout the film was beautiful, and the actors were well cast, especially in terms of appearance. Hilary Swank definitely pulled off the wide, toothy grin and determined spirit of her character. The movie did a good job of incorporating the private aspects of her life such as her affair and imperfect marriage, as well as the struggle she had with the alcoholic who was the navigator on her attempted flight around the world.
Director Mira Nair also included photographs and short clips of black and white footage from Amelia Earhart’s life. They were woven into the movie nicely so that the story seemed more real. Being able to see how big of an impression she made on American society in actual footage stressed the historical significance, and it was one of the film’s most interesting traits.
Out of five stars, “Amelia” deserves three. Although it didn’t impress with its originality or acting, it entertained. It paid tribute to a remarkable feminist and pilot in American history, and it did so gracefully and in a Hollywood kind of manner. 

Emma Riley

Although some feared that the movie counterpart would stray too far from the beloved children’s book, the movie stays true to the premise of the book; so true that some parents have questioned the appropriateness of the movie for children.
The many previews and trailers depicted fuzzy, smiling Wild Things frolicking in a brilliantly lit forest carrying their king, Max, and howling to the reverberating sea. The general mood of the movie, according to these trailers, appeared to be like a typical, feel-good, children’s movie.
The movie starts with a rebellious boy vying for Mom’s attention, who sails through a storm to discover an island filled with hungry beasts. One of the Wild Things, Carol, has anger management issues. Another, Judith, is a “downer.” The motherly figure, KW, has left the family of Wild Things for her new friends. The larger-than-life characters exaggerate Max’s jealousy, rage, depression and isolation.
All the Wild Things seem encompassed with a great sadness that drags the scenery into a brooding sepia, the music into soft wisps, and the tone into aggravating depression. Max tries to make everyone happier by running through the forest, tearing down trees and throwing dirt clods at unsuspecting creatures.
But everything stays sad and tension builds to a breaking point. In the middle of the movie, I heard a little girl across the aisle say, in an innocent voice that little girls have when something beyond their grasp enters their bubble, “Daddy, is this a true story?”
Such a genuine question made me realize that this movie portrayed a harsh world. Starting with bullies, negligence, fighting, and ending with destruction, loss, departure, the story captured the essence of a misunderstood boy who realizes the world is not always good. But the loss of boyish innocence is a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age, concept, not a childhood fantasy.
There were so many adult perceptions of childhood threaded into the characters that the little girl couldn’t understand why Max was so angry all the time, or why KW left the family, or why everything just seemed so sad.
This interpretation of the movie was different from the happy, joyous bedtime story I had expected the movie to be. Instead, the kid inside me felt confused and slightly scared. From a teenage point of view, I could understand the frustration of being ignored, the violent reactions to upsetting news and the instinct to find happiness. But from a kid’s point of view, it seemed like the happiest place in the world was filled with problems, violence and sadness.
The movie is brilliant, an absolute masterstroke of a genius. The interpretation, on the other hand, is slightly disturbing. The quality of the film was surreal. Every character was memorable, each scene was straight out of a child’s imagination, every note sung struck against the heart, but the direction of the film was too deep for a children’s movie.
“Where The Wild Things Are” is a touching movie that might help parents understand their children just a little bit better.
But it’s not a children’s movie. Parents should save this movie for when their child grows older and looks back upon his or her childhood with simplicity.
And to answer the unasked questions, yes, I cried a bucketful of tears, yes, I flashed back to all those temper tantrums, and yes, I know The Hat Kid dressed up as the King of the Wild Things for Halloween. 

CHS has an English curriculum unlike most districts. It offers 22 different courses and a conferenced writing program that provides students with 10 individual writing conferences every year. Still, some students question whether the strong emphasis on literary analysis will meet their future needs.

Most teachers support the English curriculum as it is.

“For centuries, human knowledge has been recorded in books,” CHS English Department Chair John Ryan said. “We live in an age where the means of recording is being tested by superior, faster, more efficient means of storing human knowledge. Until the time comes when books are irrelevant, we will continue to read them and explore their ideas through reflection, discussion, and composition.”

English teacher Sue Teson said that fiction is often an easier way for younger students to access ideas.

“I think that regardless of how bright or insightful students are, they’re still young in terms of experience with the world,” Teson said. “Fiction gives young minds chances to explore behavior, consequence, and loss of innocence in a way that is objective. Being able to dissect a fictional character gives them insight in facing real world experiences. Fiction is a great tool for students to talk about life.”

Also, some teachers argue that English is more skill-focused and less centered on a specific body of knowledge.

“It’s different from science, math, and history,” English teacher Emily Grady said. “Instead of memorizing material, we read and make inferences. We want you to learn to think. Learning to look at the creations around you helps you to become a good thinker. Reading fiction helps you think in different ways.”

Ryan said he believes English is one of the humanities, and the English teacher’s job is to explore the human being in relation to change.

“Books offer powerful insights into who we are, whether they are explicit discussions of real calamitous events or fictional portrayals of the harms a state can inflict on an individual,” Ryan said.

English teacher Adam Dunsker offers a similar perspective.

“I hope my students will feel confident understanding a novel on several levels in 20 years,” Dunsker said.

Ryan defended the strengths of the English curriculum.

“Over the course of four years, students get an extraordinary and nationally-recognized program in writing instruction,” Ryan said. “They read a variety of literature from drama (Shakespeare, Lorraine Hansberry, and Arthur Miller) to fiction (such as ‘Lord of the Flies’) to nonfiction (like ‘Black Boy’) to poetry (‘The Odyssey’ and works of Dickinson and Whitman).”

Although most of the core curriculum is fiction, students also study nonfiction. The English department uses essay writing and reading nonfiction works to complement the fiction-based curriculum.

“I know a lot of teachers support nonfiction with independent reading assignments, or IRAs, just to give students a different spectrum of literature,” English teacher Brenda Bollinger said. “In my AP Language class, in lieu of reading IRAs, we have reading circles. We do these about three times a semester. Students form groups of three, and then those three read the same nonfiction book and share analyses of the purpose and summary, writing strategies, and language analysis.”

The curriculum is not static but is rather a dynamic document that grows and changes.

“Each year, teachers try out new texts, plan new lessons, and examine assessments,” Ryan said. “We begin with asking, ‘What do we want students to learn?’ We have formal curriculum reviews for grades K-12 every several years. During those years, we present our curriculum to the Board of Education for approval.”

The English department also buys new texts. They select “core” and “protected” works. “Core” works are taught to all students at a certain grade level, such as “Romeo and Juliet,” and “protected” works are books that can be but are not necessarily taught at a certain grade level. These “protected” books cannot be used as “core” texts in other parts of the curriculum.

Another strength is the conferencing program; teachers work one-on-one with students 10 times a year about their writing.

“I love the conferencing program,” Grady said. “To get to work one-on-one with a students is a dream. I’m not sure that students appreciate how special it is.”

Conferencing addresses the student’s individual needs. Many students struggle with grammar.

“Concepts handled in conferences – whether grammar and usage, organization, or development – are more likely to be explored meaningfully and lastingly in such an arrangement,” Ryan said.

English teacher Dave Jenkins said the conferencing program works well for students who use it properly, but it is up to the student to understand information presented.

“Some students are short on grammar skills,” Jenkins said. “In conferencing, when I emphasize grammar, some students take it to heart, but some kids do not. It really depends on how seriously they take the assignment.”

Even though teachers must cover the core texts with their class, they do have freedom within the classroom.

“I don’t think our curriculum is so restrictive that teachers can’t bring in more grammar and nonfiction reading,” Dunsker said. “Individual teachers choose to make it a part of their own courses. For example, I probably spend more time on vocabulary than others who spend more time on reading.”

To Teson, grammar is an area in which some students lack skill.

“Grammar is a legitimate issue,” Teson said. “So much research proves that studying grammar is both good and bad. It comes down to if students read, write, and talk correctly. They should have a very acute and advanced sense of grammar if they do those things.”

Bollinger is one of the teachers who teach grammar in class, and she points out another strength in the current English curriculum.

“Our curriculum as it is exposes students to such good literature and writing that they have a sense of what is right and wrong, even though they don’t know why,” Bollinger said. “They read so much that modeling what they read is a method of learning.”

Last year, the English department started the “No Excuses” policy, an attempt to start following grammar rules known since grade school.

“The ‘No Excuses’ policy is still in effect,” Jenkins said. “Mainly, it emphasizes careful proofreading instead of grammar instruction.”

Grady said lack of students’ response to direct grammar instruction is one of the reasons teachers back away from it.

“If a lot of people would show interest in grammar, we would teach it more,” Grady said.

However, some CHS teachers believe that the middle and grade schools are also responsible for the students’ education.

“Grammar and sentence structure needs to be taught in elementary and middle school,” English teacher Sheri Steininger said.

Although some students make the point that they will not be analyzing fiction in college, the English department has a reason for teaching fictional analysis.

“The average student will encounter more nonfiction in their professional life,” Jenkins said. “However, the literary analysis is more easily taught because the author makes points through themes.”

Dunsker said that although students might prefer analyzing nonfiction, the English curriculum prepares them well through analyzing fiction.

“Also, our curriculum isn’t designed to prepare students for the work world,” Dunsker said. “Whether analyzing fiction helps you get a paycheck isn’t my primary concern. Clayton’s college preparatory curriculum isn’t the same as vocational or technical education.  We work to equip students with thinking skills that will contribute to their success in college and in a variety of life experiences.  We don’t design our courses specifically to increase students’ income.”

Steininger said that the differences between fiction and nonfiction are a matter of perspective.

“It’s important to see how people understand the world,” Steininger said. “It seems like there is not such a big difference between nonfiction and fiction if the nonfiction is narrative.”

“Snow Angel” is a story of a small group of teenagers on a snow day, who find a lost girl and attempt to help her find her way back home. Throughout the play, the main character, Eva meets each of the other characters and portrays each of them as they appear to others.

After the long process of auditions, the actors soon received their roles and began looking over the script.

The actors tended to show some mixed feelings about the show.

“It’s really abstract,” said freshman Eudora Olsen, who plays Frida.  ”We’ve done more show-tuney productions whereas this is more edgy; the audience has to think so it’s new to me,” freshman Eudora Olsen who plays Frida said.

Freshman Emma Riley, who plays the role of Eva, said she didn’t originally like the play.

“After blocking it and seeing how it looks, and how we act together, I think it’s going to be really good. And we have a good director to pull it off.”

This year’s director for the freshman-sophomore play is Adam Florese.

“I love the director,” Olsen said.  ”He’s such a chill guy.”

Florese tends to make the rehearsals fun for students. Not only that, but he has also helped to improve students’ acting abilities as well.

“The quality of the blocking is so much better,” Riley said. “Beforehand [in middle school productions] it told me just where to go. Now I feel like I’m improving my acting abilities as well.”

This director hasn’t only helped to give the actors better direction, but he has also helped them to develop a better understanding of their characters.

This was done by having each student bring in a song that best represented the character they would be playing, and then having them explain it to the group.

“The director helped us to get a better understanding of our characters,” Riley said. “It really helped because we know our characters better and we know how to interpret them and say their lines.”

Florese has a unique way of doing things when it comes to theatre. One of the rules for “Snow Angel” is that every character must wear one costume piece of their own. They must also lend a costume piece to another character as well.

The drama department puts on a show meant to be mainly cast with freshmen and sophomores because it gives them the opportunity to receive larger roles.  Even though this show is meant to be for mainly freshmen and sophomores, the upperclassmen tend to take part in it as well.

“In case they needed more people, we’ve always implemented upperclassmen into the underclassmen play because of the shortage of parts,” junior John Holland, who plays the character Crank, said.

Since upperclassmen are allowed to audition and because this year specifically all the auditions were done together, the freshmen were a little tense about them.  Riley explained that this was only her second time having callbacks and for her it was a little frightening.

“It was a little nerve-racking because you get experiences with other actors in callbacks and there’s more competition,” Riley said.

The actors have gone through the long drawn out process of auditions, and are in the process of surviving the hard work of rehearsals. They hope that they get a good crowd to come and see the play. Tickets are five dollars, and the show will take place on Nov. 20 and 21.

NASA scientists decided to search at the moon’s southern pole because it is in permanent shadow. The sunlight hasn’t reached these areas for what is estimated to be billions of years. Due to the lack of atmosphere on the moon, any small elements or compounds that are vaporized will simply float out into the vacuum of space. The ice at the South Pole does not have enough energy to evaporate in these “cold traps” and would remain on the moon.

According to the NASA website, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) impacted the surface of the moon on Oct. 9, 113-days after launching on June 18. The satellite covered the 5.6 million miles from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to its final destination at the moon’s permanently shadowed South Pole.

The data was collected by LCROSS from an impact made by an upper stage rocket that traveled with the satellite. The collision with the moon’s surface created a large crater, tossing up debris and, just as scientists had hoped, ice.

The mission was a success. Centaur, the upper stage rocket attached to LCROSS, separated about 54,059 miles above the moon’s surface. LCROSS collected data and pictures from Centaur’s initial impact for four minutes before impacting the moon itself.

The event was broadcasted on television nationwide. Millions of Americans tuned in to watch history in the making. However, the launch didn’t live up to some peoples’ expectations.

“I thought it was pretty anticlimactic,” CHS science teacher Gabriel de la Paz said. “It was mostly just a big cloud of dust.”

The significance of the experiment lies in space exploration. Scientists would like to know if the moon could possibly sustain life. This would allow colonies to form easily without constant expensive transportations of basic goods such as food, water and oxygen.

In opposition to many who believe that the value of water on the moon would be great, de la Paz thinks that the efforts are unnecessary.

“The amount of energy to get stuff to the moon is probably more than the amount of energy we get from stuff from the moon,” de la Paz said.

Scientists see the moon as a stepping-stone to explore the rest of the solar system. It would serve as a practice environment for explorers to use to learn how to work safely in harsh surroundings. From the moon, possibilities seem endless.

A July article in Prevention Magazine claimed that MRSA can now be found in food, specifically in your burger, chop, or tenderloin. According to the article, workers in meat processing plants began showing symptoms of MRSA infection. Research has found MRSA-tainted meat in not only the United States, but in Europe and Canada as well.

So should you be worried?

“I think the news media hypes [MRSA] up more than it should,” said John Middleton, Associate Professor, Food Animal Medicine and Surgery at University of Missouri. “That said, I think people should be aware of it.”

Unlike other strains of staph bacteria, MRSA, as its name suggests, is resistant to methicillin, or synthetic penicillin, among numerous other standard antibiotics. This makes it harder to treat MRSA infections without resorting to antibiotics, which are much more potent. Though it was once more of a hospital-acquired disease, MRSA has in recent years become more of a community-acquired disease. Its symptoms can include the formation of pustules and reddish bumps on the skin that resemble spider bites.

A study which Middleton helped to conduct found MRSA in households in both human and animal hosts. Approximately a quarter of all sampled humans had staph; 20 percent within this number were found to have MRSA. Of the sampled pets, 13 percent had staph, however 23 percent within this number were found to harbor MRSA.

Unlike Prevention, however, Middleton isn’t sounding the alarm.

“We found the same identical strain [of MRSA] in a household pet and a person in four out of about 600 households,” Middleton said. “Not infected, just colonized.”

MRSA, Middleton said, is actually much more common in people than one might think. He estimates that perhaps one out of every four people in America is colonized with S. aureus (general staph), and about one in four of those people harbor MRSA.

“You could have MRSA right now, and not know it,” Middleton said. “You could become colonized and never show any symptoms.”

Another uncertain factor in the study was the issue of cross-contamination.

“We can detect MRSA in a dog or pig or horse or human,” Middleton said. “but we don’t know who infected who. We think that MRSA mostly originates in people, but we can’t be sure. There’s only so much we can tell.”

An exception to this rule is the discovery of a strain of MRSA, known as the ST398 strain, which originated in pigs and spread to humans.

Whatever the case or origin, Middleton agreed that MRSA has been found in food, in both meat and dairy products.

“The fact that we isolated [MRSA] in the food doesn’t say where it came from,” Middleton said. “But it is probably mostly post-harvest contamination.”

That is to say, most MRSA found in food isn’t really from the food itself. It’s from an infected worker carelessly touching his nose—MRSA flourishes in the nasal passages—during work, or not washing his hands.

“It does boil down to hygiene in processing and handling,” Middleton said. “And if there was a pig colonized with MRSA whose pork became contaminated during slaughter, cooking would likely kill the bacteria. It’s like drinking unpasteurized milk. It might be colonized with MRSA. The MRSA dies during pasteurization.”

Whether the MRSA entered your meat through a colonized pig or a sneezing meat handler, Middleton recommends one simple tip: wash your hands, especially after preparing or handling raw food.

“It’s not like walking into Jack in the Box and eating a hamburger and getting e-coli,” Middleton said.

In addition, take note: the bacteria can enter the body through open skin. Avoid touching raw meat with a cut hand.

However, there are bigger things to worry about; the “superbug” label given to MRSA is mostly a media-given nickname, according to Middleton. Though it can be fatal, most people are only colonized, not infected.

“Worse than influenza?” he said. “Probably not. Compared to swine flu, it’s likely less insignificant.”

So the MRSA in your meat may not be as bad as they say—if you know the facts. So do yourself a favor and wash your hands. It won’t just save you from a potential MRSA infection, but scores of other infectious diseases—like swine flu—as well.