33 men & an insufficiency of blow-up dolls

The Chilean government showed good medical sense in refusing to provide an insufficient number of blow-up dolls to 33 miners trapped underground, if a February 16, 2011 report in The Mirror is accurate. The newspaper says:

[A new book called 33 Men, by Jonathan Franklin, a New York Times journalist] reveals that a request for blow-up dolls was refused because they could not get hold of 33 of them and did not want the men to share. The doctor who assessed the men’s health needs from the surface, Jean Romagnoli, explained: “A guy offered them inflatable dolls but he only had 10. I said ’33 or none'”.

That reasoning echoes, in spirit, the lesson presented in the Ig Nobel Prize-winning study “Transmission of Gonorrhea Through an Inflatable Doll“  [Genitourinary Medicine, vol. 69, no. 4, Aug. 1993, p. 322], which we described recently in connection with other inflatable-doll-related current events.