Thanks to an alert commenter, I can report that things aren’t as dire as they first appeared. Please see the links in his/her comment below.

The comment:

Tyson, you’d better update this story, pronto.

The TV station you’ve cited has updated the story extensively and retracted many of the claims.

http://www.kfsm.com/global/story.asp?s=7845322

Also, the Arkansas Department of Health is reporting that there is NO outbreaks of TB or leprosy in the state.

http://www.healthyarkansas.com/news/pr_tb_020808.html

Basically, the long and short of it is that only 5% of the population is susceptible to leprosy, so an epidemic isn’t technically possible. Government officials were wrong about something. Who’d a thunk it?

***Original Post (in part) Below***

Officials in Arkansas are concerned that a leprosy–yes, the biblical leprosy–epidemic could be on the horizon. The nine cases reported in Springdale, officials warn, could become a full-fledged epidemic.

I’m not nearly 100% yet, but I have ventured out of bed and done a little reading and surfing. Jeane is taking excellent care of me. Life seems worth living again, so I must be improving. I have had to keep asking Jeane what day it is, since I have been way out of it.

Sunday seems strange without church. I guess we really do grow attached to folks.

In my surfing, I did come across this from Dennis Miller on Hannity & Colmes:

Peggy Noonan posted a column last Friday that I hope was not lost in the holiday shuffle. In it, she addressed the need to deal with illegal immigration–not forever–but for now. It makes a lot of sense. She leads up to it this way:

More and more our leaders forget the common sense of grandma. In most everyone’s family there was a grandma who used to sit quietly in the corner and say nothing. Then someone would ask her opinion just to be polite, and she’d say something so wise, so commonsensical, it stopped everyone in their tracks. And you realized that she was smart, that she’d lived a life and seen things.

What is her common-sense answer? You have to read the column to see.