By Warren Brown
Sunday, May 14, 2006

My doctors remain chary about me visiting my flood-ravaged hometown of New Orleans. They worry that the city is so miserably polluted after weeks of submergence in Hurricane Katrina's toxin-and-sewage-tainted waters that my health -- the health of anyone living with donated organs -- would be put at risk.

It is an understandable concern.

I am a two-time kidney transplant patient, and as is the case with practically all transplant patients, I take numerous drugs to suppress my body's immune system. In the odd mathematics of organ-transplant life, immune system suppression equals organ retention. That is a good thing for organ recipients who enjoy living.

But it's a tricky business. Suppressed immune systems are less able to ward off opportunistic infections. That means people with chemically reduced states of immunity, if they are not careful, could wind up getting awfully sick in a still unclean city where poisons and corpses floated through streets eight months ago.

You might be wondering what any of this has to do with cars and trucks. Bear with me. I will get to that.

But right now, I'd like to tell you about the pictures I've seen -- photos taken by my sister-in-law Jayne Brown and other relatives -- of our family-owned houses ruined by the flood.

The interior walls of those houses are covered with the thickest, most wretched-looking mold. Jayne, a doctor in Philadelphia, said the smell is horrendous. Those houses are uninhabitable and must be demolished.

Jayne is one of several physicians warning me in sternest terms not to go to New Orleans -- not now, anyway.

"You'd have to be out of your mind to go there," she said. "Don't do it."

But what if New Orleans and Katrina's residual microbes came to me?

According to the National Automobile Dealers Association, an estimated 571,000 cars, the vast majority of them in New Orleans, lay beneath Katrina's fetid waters, taking in the toxins and hostile bacteria those waters carried.

Now, as you may have anticipated and are probably not surprised to hear, tens of thousands of those Katrina cars have filtered back into the marketplace and into the garages and parking spaces of unsuspecting consumers.

Let us put aside for a moment conventional and understandable concerns about the reliability and safety performance of those Katrina-damaged vehicles. It is enough to say, if you have been unfortunate enough to buy one, you will have problems -- electrical, mechanical and possibly structural.

But there is a possibility that you might have something else -- a disease lurking in the vehicle's ventilation system, behind the panels of its doors, or within the cushions of its seats that profiteering scalawags could not disinfect before sending them to auction.

There appears to be little federal concern about this possibility. And I am perhaps a bit sensitive to the issue of disease transmission.

But bacteria travel well. They don't mind riding in coach class, or in any other compartment that affords them passage.

And, again, my mind goes back to the photographs shown to me by Jayne. I cannot erase the images of that mold and slime, that physical corruption. It makes me wonder: If the houses submerged by Katrina are fit only for demolition, why don't we have a more aggressive policy of tracking down and scrapping those Katrina-flooded cars and trucks?

If the flooded houses have been adjudged severe disease hazards, are we to assume that the flooded cars are immune?