Well, 1984 was a long time ago. We’ve now had 20 years of EVERYONE having a microwave, increasingly dysfunctional parents, and that adds up to billions of opportunities for babies to be placed in microwave ovens.
I’d give even odds that this has in fact happened since 1984. Of course even odds means that it hasn’t happened. But considering the hundreds of millions of babies, the hundreds of millions of ignorant teen babysitters, and throwing in a few hundred thousand parents with murder on their mind, surely, perhaps, a baby has been microwaved in the last 19 years?
It could’ve happened, but I’ll wager that if it happened, it wasn’t an accident. (In other words, if it happened, I’m willing to bet it was murder.)
I’ve microwaved a dead whole animal before. We had a pet snake years ago, and at first we tried to feed it frozen baby mice (“fuzzies”, which have just started to develop hair but haven’t yet opened their eyes). The normal procedure is to microwave the mouse not only to thaw it but also bring it up to normal mouse body temperature. The snake will not eat what it believes to be dead, so you have to fool it into thinking the mouse is either dead or VERY freshly killed. (The snake wasn’t fooled, unfortunately, and we had to switch to live food.) But it takes some experimentation to find the right microwave setting. The first time we tried nuking a dead, frozen mouse, we overheated it and a hole popped open in the abdomen. I would presume something very similar would eventually happen when nuking a live mouse – the abdominal cavity certainly filled with steam and eventually exceeded its capacity (as Cecil presumes would happen in his article).
Death by microwave would be very painful. Your body fluids would heat up rapidly, scalding you, burning you, and then actually killing you, even before they started boiling. Modern microwave ovens are very well focused, however, so even if you do get past the safety countermeasures and can open it while it is running, microwave radiation isn’t likely to leak out in any significant quantity.
There was a case a few years ago where a baby was brougth to the hospital with radiation burns from a microwave—the mother’s story was that the baby was lying either on top of or next to the stove and it “leaked” (the stove, I mean).
I can’t remember how badly the baby was injured or what the outcome of the case was, though . . .
zuma, Eve, no offense, but did either of you read the entire article? Cecil mentions both the leakage case and a case of (presumably) murder by microwave.