Wendy and I will be doing some traveling this summer. We’ve traveled a bit during COVID-19 and have felt pretty comfortable navigating the various health and safety protocols. Until now, that is.

This week I made the mistake of looking at the recent travel advisory issued by the Center for Disease Control for monkeypox. In its advisory, the CDC advises travelers to avoid close contact with “sick people,” including those with “skin lesions or genital lesions.” So far so good. I avoid contact with sick people in general and people with visible skin lesions in particular.

I don’t think it would be a good idea to be asking strangers I encounter if they happen to be sporting any genital lesions. Instead, I think I will just assume that everyone likely to have a genital lesion or two they are keeping under wraps until the contrary has been proven.

Next, the CDC’s Monkeypox Advisory advises travelers to avoid contact with “dead or live animals such as small mammals including rodents [rats, squirrels] and non-human primates [monkeys, apes].”

I will have no problem with avoiding contact with any non-human primates as my travels won’t be taking me anywhere near places populated by primates other than those of the human variety. And I’m not really worried about running into too many small mammals. What bothers me about this particular CDC warning is the way they’ve so casually lumped rats and squirrels into the same parenthetical. I don’t know about you, but my reaction to encountering a squirrel at home or abroad is very different from my reaction to encountering a rat anywhere at any time.

I can’t help but feel that somehow the CDC has defamed squirrels by equating them with rats, who admittedly may have gotten a bum rap by playing such a key role in the transmission of The Plague. This unfair (and unflattering) association with rats makes me less inclined to avoid squirrels in my travels. In fact, I may reach out to any squirrels I meet as a way of showing them a little inter-species solidarity in their fight to distance themselves from their more verminy cousins.

The CDC also advises against “eating or preparing meat from wild game [bushmeat].” I don’t believe I’ve ever ordered anything from a grocery store or menu identified as “bushmeat,” but the last time I was in Scotland I did have venison on at least two occasions. Is venison a bushmeat? If so, have I been inadvertently exposed to monkeypox? Is monkeypox better or worse than chickenpox? Can chickens get monkeypox and vice versa? Sadly, the CDC Monkeypox Advisory doesn’t answer any of those important questions.

Since I was on already on the CDC website, I figured I’d see what other diseases the CDC was tracking these days. But after a quick browse through Ebola, Dengue fever, Dracinculiasis (Guinea Worm Disease) and leprosy, I decided I had enough health advising for one day.

Just to put to rest one other concern I have about traveling, I quickly looked at the NASA website to check on the status of the recently photographed supermassive black hole lying at the center of the Milky Way galaxy near Sagittarius A. Black holes have hundreds or even thousands of times the mass of our own sun and such strong gravitational pull that nothing can get out of them, not even light, which makes them invisible and very hard to detect.

There had been some speculation that black holes might be able to move about the universe and consume moons, planets and even stars. I didn’t want to spend the money on airfare if it looked like there was any chance of the Earth being swallowed by a black hole before our flight. NASA assured me this is something I need not worry about. However, the image of the recently sighted black hole I found on the internet bore a striking and disturbing similarity to a monkeypox pustule.

Coincidence? Or interstellar warning to spring for the cost of travel insurance? Only time will tell.

Tom Tyner writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper.