DISCOVERY OF THE MONTH:LET’S BLAME IT ON THE DANCING GIRLS

Urban myth surrounds the origins of a variety of diseases, such as African monkeys and AIDS. The latest addition to the list is that ‘exotic’ dancers can spread TB.

To arrive at this, health officials investigated a cluster of 18 cases of TB among “dancers in adult entertainment clubs” a.k.a. strippers between 1994 and 2000 in Witchita, Kansas.

Seven of the eight women were exotic dancers, seven were men and three were children, whose mothers were presumably ‘exotic’ dancers. Twelve had been drug takers, and 10 had been in prison sometime between 1994 and 2000.

So, of these cases, 11 were, in fact, not exotic dancers, and one woman had never done any exotic dancing in her life.

Nonetheless, let’s go with the myth much more interesting than drugs or imprisonment, and it should keep those Web chatrooms cackling for months to come (JAMA, 2001; 285: 2322).