You Have Died of Dysentery

The Oregon Trail disease is back, it's an STI now, and the CDC filed it under food poisoning.

YOUR BATHROOM (The Daily Whatever Press) — Dysentery is back, and this time you can’t blame the Oregon Trail. Shigella — the bacterium that killed your pixelated ox-cart family on an Apple IIe in 1987 — has spent the last decade reinventing itself as a sexually transmitted infection, and on Thursday the New York Post found out, which is how the rest of America found out, which is how Catturd found out. More on him in a minute, but only a minute, because that guy is a douchebag.

The CDC’s own report, published in April, examined 16,788 shigella samples from 2011 to 2023, and it is a fucking horror show. Extensively drug-resistant cases—immune to all five oral antibiotics we would normally throw at them—went from zero in 2011 to two in 2016 to 280 in 2023. More than a third of those patients were hospitalized. And the CDC’s treatment recommendation, quoted in full: there isn’t one. “No FDA-approved oral antimicrobial agents are available.” A UCLA microbiologist called it “almost like an explosion.” A Cambridge researcher called the disease “close to untreatable.” These are not people who talk like that for fun.

So how do you breed a superbug? A 2026 study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases has a theory called bystander resistance, and it is as elegant as it is infuriating: you prescribe azithromycin for gonorrhea, and the shigella living in the same patient— uninvited, undiagnosed, unbilled — sits in on the same course, learns the same lessons, and graduates. We didn’t lose the fight to this bug. We trained it. Somewhere in a lab fridge in Atlanta, there is a shigella colony with a framed diploma and a LinkedIn profile.

And wouldn’t you know it, the agency responsible for noticing tracks shigella resistance through its foodborne surveillance system, which is like tracking carjackings through the DMV: technically adjacent, functionally blind. The intake form has two boxes — “ate the potato salad” and “traveled abroad” — and there is no third box that says “ate some tasty ass”.

Dr. Ferric Fang, at the University of Washington, who may be a werewolf based simply on his name if I remember my Harry Potter correctly, said it plainly: shigella “falls through the cracks in public health between sexually transmitted infections and foodborne infections.” The CDC’s own epidemiologist conceded the data on sexual behavior were too thin for “meaningful interpretations.” Twelve years. Sixteen thousand samples. Not enough to interpret, because no one ever thought to ask, “have you munched butt recently?”

Which brings us to Catturd, who posted that “superbug mudslide gonorrhea” wasn’t on his bingo card. Buddy, you are forty-four years late. I was there when they printed the bingo card. In October 1982, Reagan’s press secretary was asked about the “gay plague” and joked, “I don’t have it — do you?” and the briefing room laughed, and was apparently so goddamned funny that gay guys were dying that they forgot to fund any research while the bodies stacked up. Nearly half of the extremely drug-resistant patients the CDC could check were living with HIV. The same men. The same joke. A fresh coat of paint.

Here is the thing about a bacterium: it only has to learn once. Shigella took twelve years to figure out five antibiotics. This country has had forty-four years and two epidemics, and it is still filing the gay one under food poisoning.

Wash your hands. Get tested. And, seriously, wash your fucking hands.

---

Thanks for stopping by!

We’re Dana DuBois and Lawrence Winnerman, lifelong BFFs and co-hosts of The Daily Whatever Show — our independent home for smart, irreverent conversations about culture, politics, media, creativity, relationships, aging, and whatever else is shaping modern life this week.

We’re live every Friday at 10am ET with thoughtful analysis, sharp interviews, cultural commentary, humor, and the kind of conversations that don’t pretend everything is fine when it clearly isn’t.

If you’re enjoying what we’re building, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. Your support helps us keep the show independent, book fascinating guests, and continue creating smart conversations with your morning coffee.

We love you — mean it!