Snuggle Up to These Cuddle Bugs

Soft, huggable stuffed toys have for generations served to amuse and to comfort. Plush toys remain wildly popular, but one Connecticut manufacturer has left the making of stuffed bears and dogs and all the other cute critters squarely to others.

Instead, GIANTmicrobes concentrates on bringing to stuffed-toy life facsimiles of much smaller life forms, and ones not readily thought of as either cute or comforting.

How about a stuffed giardia? Or a heartworm? Maybe salmonella is more to your liking. And for the adults, the company even offers several stuffed venereal maladies.

In response to critical current global health news, GIANTmicrobes -- who makes these and dozens of other stuffed likenesses of viruses, pests and parasites -- has recently added H1N1 Swine Flu virus (pictured) to its product roster.

In fact, this latter item, as recently reported at AOL.com, has proven to be wildly popular in the gift shop at none other than the Centers for Disease Control. The products are indeed fun and offbeat, and are designed to provide a quirky and enjoyable way to get closer to some pretty nasty subjects.

Hang tags attached to each toy offer information about the subject including such matters as incubation time, transmission and long-term effects. Quality and serious scientific information rests at the root of these stuffed critters, and how the company hopes they will be used and enjoyed, according to a statement on their website:

"[W]e believe that GIANTmicrobes can indeed be used effectively to convey information about public-health diseases in a unique and memorable way. Although designed for health care professionals, our new products are available to the general public as well, as the dissemination of information is exactly the point."

After all, it's far better to snuggle up to a stuffed version, and to receive some relevant information about how to protect yourself as you do so, than to become acquainted with the real thing.

Photo ©GIANTmicrobes, used with permission