A sudden and mysterious outbreak of communicable illness started not too long ago in my condo constructing in Manhattan. Three 7-year-olds, a boy and two women, had been sharing the elevator at some point with a caretaker and a random grownup (me). The boy was leaning towards the again of the elevator, between the 2 women. “Assist! I’m in a woman sandwich,” he mentioned. “If I’m not cautious, I’m going to get cooties!”
“Children nonetheless play Cooties?” I requested, stunned that cooties weren’t a relic of my Boomer childhood however had endured into the twenty first century, nonetheless sparking alarm, feigned or actual, among the many younger. “Yeah-huh,” the boy mentioned. One of many women piped up: “I understand how to offer a cootie shot.” She demonstrated on her personal shoulder, her approach a little bit of a blur.
The youngsters and their caretaker bought off on their flooring, leaving me to ponder the cootie phenomenon for the primary time in lots of a long time. Past being amused, I used to be struck by the morbid salience of a youngsters’s sport that mimics an infection at a time when vaccine skepticism is on the rise and an outbreak of a non-pretend illness, measles, is threatening the lives of youngsters within the Southwest. I realized that there’s a vibrant if slender slice of educational literature on “preadolescent cootie lore,” as one scholar places it, and that this goofy grade-school fixation is extra intently tied to actual public-health considerations than you would possibly assume in case your cootie experience derives solely from the playground.
What precisely are cooties? Since at the least the Nineteen Sixties, area researchers have collected definitions of various specificity from grammar-school respondents: “boys’ germs,” “women’ germs,” “one thing that kills you,” “like germs, it has germs on it,” “the place any individual licks the underside of the chair or eats paper.” Different consultants converse of cooties in additional anthropological phrases. The College of Wisconsin at Milwaukee folklorist Simon J. Bronner has characterised cooties as a “ritualized affliction.” Of their seminal 1976 e book, One Potato, Two Potato: The Folklore of American Children, Herbert and Mary Knapp described cooties as a form of sport. “There are not any supervised Cootie leagues, however extra individuals in the USA have performed Cooties than have performed baseball, basketball, and soccer mixed,” they wrote. “It’s our unofficial nationwide sport.”
By Mary Knapp and Herbert Knapp
Cooties actually have one thing to do with hygiene. In keeping with a (considerably gross) evaluation by Lawrence A. Hirschfeld, an anthropologist on the New College for Social Analysis, cooties are “a social contaminant that go from one baby to a different,” made up of “the invisible particulates related to germs, farts, or ‘boogers.’” They appear to attract upon youngsters’s anxieties about sickness and medical doctors but additionally gender, reflecting the complicated mixture of flirtation and social opprobrium connected to boy-girl relations (and never completely absent from grownup life). Past that, Hirschfeld concludes, “Cootie lore is just not conceptually orderly.”
Cootie historical past is clearer. The phrase itself started life as a British colonial time period, most likely a corruption of kutu, a Malay phrase for lice and different biting bugs. American troopers picked it up, because it had been, from their allies throughout World Conflict I. A New York Instances report from 1918, headlined “Doughboys Lose Cooties,” described troopers who “scratch with a vengeance” lining up at a “Disinfecting Plant” run by the American Pink Cross. One “lanky New England lad” exclaims, “I’ve bought all of the cooties in France.” Within the Twenties, video games referencing cooties turned fashionable at bridal showers, in honor of grooms who had served in Europe (and likewise provoked, maybe, by sublimated anxiousness about different communicable illnesses they could have introduced residence). One model concerned drawing separate elements of a bug, primarily based on rolls of a cube, till a winner had a accomplished louse. This follow advanced into Cootie, the sport wherein youngsters assemble plastic bugs with fiddlehead-fern-like proboscises, which was launched nationwide in 1949 and continues to be manufactured at the moment.
The invisible-particulate type of cooties seems to have hit American playgrounds someday within the Thirties, however surveys counsel that it didn’t turn into ubiquitous till the early ’50s, on the top of the polio epidemic. Earlier than the polio vaccine was launched in 1955, tens of hundreds of youngsters had been catching the illness yearly; hundreds of them died, and extra had been left paralyzed. In his e book Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture, Bronner writes that cooties and cootie pictures—“circle circle, dot dot” being one traditional formulation—had been a method for kids “to dramatize the dread of the illness.” Cooties was additionally fashionable through the ’80s, when youngsters had been listening to lots about AIDS.
By Simon J. Bronner
This type of imitative play—not simply Cooties but additionally Home or Cops and Robbers—helps youngsters make sense of the world. Like nursery rhymes, it may also be commentary, even a form of satiric outsider artwork. As Iona Opie, a pioneering British youngsters’s folklorist, as soon as noticed: “Step into the playground; a form of defiant lightheartedness envelops you. The kids are … making enjoyable of life.” This was apparently very a lot the case through the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Bronner informed me that whereas colleges had been shut down and children had been remoted at residence, they started sending each other memes wherein cooties tended to symbolize a form of generalized pandemic funk. Furthermore, the senders typically depicted themselves as infants—in Bronner’s interpretation, a humorous expression of their frustration at not with the ability to do regular child issues.
I suppose it’s comforting that, 5 years after COVID-19 was first declared a pandemic, my elevator acquaintances had returned to an in-person fashion of cootie play, performing out their venerable parody of an infection and defending themselves with pictures within the arm. However the epidemiological satire takes on an particularly darkish solid when it expresses extra religion within the energy of vaccination than does the present secretary of Well being and Human Companies, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy has dismissed the scientifically confirmed efficacy of the polio vaccine as “mythology,” regardless of polio having been thought of eradicated within the U.S. since 1979. (Earlier than he was confirmed, a spokesperson noted: “Mr. Kennedy believes the polio vaccine needs to be obtainable to the general public and completely and correctly studied.” Not fairly a full-throated endorsement.) He has additionally sown doubt about vaccines at a time when vaccine hesitancy is fueling a historic and horrifying measles outbreak within the Southwest, which has now contaminated greater than 600 individuals within the U.S. and killed two unvaccinated youngsters in Texas—the primary measles deaths in America in a decade. An grownup who died in New Mexico was additionally discovered to be contaminated with measles. (Exterior the U.S., the well being secretary of Chihuahua, Mexico, announced that an unvaccinated man had died of measles in reference to the Texas outbreak.)
Kennedy has spoken about the advantages of the MMR vaccine but additionally continues to undermine its security and efficacy. He has repeatedly emphasised parental alternative in vaccination and, as The Atlantic reported, told the grieving father of 1 Texas baby, “You don’t know what’s within the vaccine anymore.” He insists on selling unproven alternative treatments resembling cod-liver oil (a supply of vitamin A), antibiotics, and steroids; in a Fox Information interview, he claimed that these can result in “an nearly miraculous and instantaneous restoration.” In keeping with precise virologists, this can be a prodigious exaggeration of vitamin A’s efficacy, and within the case of the opposite supposed miracle cures, it’s pure invention.
A cootie shot is likely to be an much more fanciful therapy, however, not like with vitamin A, overdoing it received’t result in liver injury, which Texas pediatricians told The New York Instances they’re now seeing in unvaccinated younger sufferers, whose dad and mom had been presumably paying Kennedy heed. When so many adults appear intent on returning to the Darkish Ages, we should cherish medical knowledge wherever we discover it. In 2025, the cootie shot stands as an inadvertent rebuke to the nation’s prime well being official, in that it emphasizes vaccines’ very actual efficacy towards illness. I’m wondering if the HHS secretary has ever heard this anecdote from his family historical past. On February 25, 1923, his grandmother Rose Kennedy recorded the next in her journal: “Joe Jr. and Jack have a brand new track in regards to the Bedbugs and the Cooties. Additionally a membership the place they provoke new members by sticking pins into them.” Did RFK Jr.’s uncles (who had seemingly acquired smallpox vaccinations) invent cootie pictures? A subject for additional analysis.
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