A fascinating fact about gonorrhea as it relates to The Avengers.
While watching Robert Altman’s Avengers 2: Age of Ultron, I found myself pondering which character is the strongest. Is it the Hulk? Iron Man, especially in his Hulk fighting suit? Captain America? Hawkeye? (Just kidding.) Thor?
I’ll go with Thor, because he’s a demigod. I might be wrong, but I think the continuum of strength goes: God, magician, radioactive experiment gone wrong, robot, other type of experiment gone wrong, steroid user.
But that’s not really why we’re here. We’re here to talk about something stronger than all the Avengers.
Gonorrhea.
I was doing my weekly reading about STDs yesterday and happened upon an article about gonorrhea’s super strength. No, really — super strength.
Gonorrhea is a … beast. These tiny creatures can pull with a force equal to 100,000 times their body weight. What would this equate to in humans? Well, it would be as though a human could drag 10 million kilos (22 million pounds).
…
Pound-for-pound, [gonorrhea is] the strongest organism ever.
That’s right, and that’s fascinating: The strongest living thing ever is an STD. And not even one of the ones people worry about.
Is gonorrhea a superhero? Its nickname, “The Clap,” is just like The Hulk or The Flash. It has its kryptonite: Antibiotics. Like other superheroes who are a little long in the tooth, it’s evolving and finding ways to beat that kryptonite to stay relevant and interesting. Like superhero movies, it seems to be rapidly appearing at a higher rate than ever before. And like superhero movies, no matter how serious it takes itself, we all kind of just laugh it off because we know good will triumph in the end.
Still… probably best to avoid it. (Gonorrhea, not superhero movies. They’re still entertaining, although the saturation point is approaching rapidly.)
And finally, big word of warning based on my experience putting together the graphic for this post: Do not ever, under any circumstances, do a Google Image Search for “gonorrhea.” This isn’t me trying to make it forbidden fruit. This is not a drill. You must promise me you will never look it up.
