Follow your nose! To a sexual partner not beset by disease!

A Russian study found that men dealing with gonorrhea has less attractive smelling armpit sweat than those without, therefore deterring potential mates.

In the study, armpit sweat was collected from 34 Russian men, ages 17 to 25. Thirteen of the men had gonorrhea, 16 were healthy, and five had had gonorrhea in the past, but recovered. The men wore T-shirts with cotton pads in the armpits for one hour, then the pads were placed in glass vials…

The women rated the infected men’s sweat as less than half as pleasant as the healthy men’s sweat. And the women said about 50 percent of men who had gonorrhea had sweat that smelled “putrid,” whereas only 32 percent of the healthy men were described as putrid. And while 26 percent of the healthy men smelled “floral,” just 10 percent of those with gonorrhea were described that way.

Researchers suggest that changes in the immune system could cause the alteration in sweat stink. I like to think of it as Mother Nature’s way of telling women, “Get away from him girl, he nasty.”

[Live Science]

Stephen Mabbutt was diagnosed with superior canal dehiscence syndrome (SCDS), which is a rare condition where sounds inside the body become very loud.  Aside from hearing his own eyeballs roll in his head, he could hear his own heart beating and chewing food was a deafening experience.  Surgeons were able to repair the condition and the patient is doing fine.

“Eventually I could hear my heart beating and my eyes moving in their sockets. It was really distracting.”

Mr Mabbutt was referred to Martin Burton, a surgeon from the Oxford Radcliffe Hospital who helped establish the Cochrane Ear, Nose and Throat Disorders Group. A CT scan found perforations inside the semicircular canals inside Mr Mabbutt’s ear.

He was diagnosed with superior canal dehiscence syndrome (SCDS), a rare condition discovered by American surgeon Lloyd B Minor in 1995, which is thought to only effect one in 500,000 a year in Britain.

The operation to cure the problem involved a 5cm (2in) incision behind the ear, making a channel through the bone to find the “balance organ” and using the patient’s own bone to create a seal around the defect, the BBC said.

[The Telegraph]

1. Histoplasmosis - also known as Cave Disease or Spelunker’s Lung, is caused by the fungus Histoplasma capsulatum and primarily affects the lungs. It is fatal if untreated, and hey, it grows in soil contaminated with bat droppings.
2. Rabies – Bats make up a quarter of the rabid animals reported to the CDC. Enough said.
3. Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever – Found in equatorial African caves, this cousin of Ebola incubates in fruit bats that live in caves and mines.
4. Leptospirosis - Also known as Rat Catcher’s Yellow, this is caused by infection with bacteria of the genus Leptospira which grows in water contaminated with the urine of bats and rats. Do not drink cave water.
5. Cave Fever – Also known as relapsing fever, this disease comes from getting bitten by infected ticks.

I think the real lesson here is that bats are filled with disease.

For a casual tourist, like the 500,000 annual visitors to Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, walking through a cave is essentially as safe as walking down the street. It is the sport cavers, those who crawl through muck and mud into little-explored crevices, that must protect themselves from things living on bats, rodents, ticks and other bugs, Igreja said.

Igreja surveys the classic and emerging cave-borne diseases in the June 10 Wilderness and Environmental Medicine. We’ve collected a gallery of the offending cave fauna, along with tips about how to keep sickness away next time you’re slithering among the stalagmites. Note: None of these diseases are exclusive to caves. Strange bugs can strike almost anywhere.

[Wired]

A graduate student attending the University of Georgia has created a 52-minute album featuring musically transcribed HIV afflicted DNA.

On sale now at Amazon!

[Amazon via reader Tess]

“Why do I need to buy windshield wiper fluid?” wheezed the Cheapest Man in the World. “I’m just going to shoot it out on the street!”

As it turns out, those who try and use tap water to clean the bug incrusted looking glass are likely poisoning themselves with Legionnaries’ Disease.

If you use standard tap water in your windshield washer fluid reservoir instead of a cleaner, you may have effectively turned your vehicle into a biological weapon. Sure, that sounds cool and all, but according to BBC News, the only person you’re going to be hurting is yourself. As it turns out, using plain water can cause the washer fluid system to become a breeding ground for Legionella bacterium – the same nastiness that causes Legionaires’ Disease and pneumonia. Spray your windshield and the bacteria becomes airborne, allowing it to easily enter your lungs and wreak havoc with your immune system.

Don’t be such a cheapskate. Buy the fluid. Save on antibiotics.

[BBC via Autoblog]

Historical journeys can be a slog. What can I say? It’s all those damn facts. Even human medical experimentation in America can read a little bit yawny when it’s dragged out in paragraph form. Fortunately, I have no integrity and am, therefore, not above the use of cheap structural gimmicks. It’s like in that song from Mary Poppins about the sugar and the medicine, except the sugar is the structural gimmick and the medicine is the cough syrup that I’m drinking right now. Chim-chim-cheroo.

Time Period: 1940s

Problem: All the darn malaria that’s plaguing U.S. Naval troops in the Pacific theater.

Solution: Bring a bunch of malarial mosquitoes and experimental malaria vaccines to Statesville Penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois, infect a whole mess of volunteers and then test the vaccines on them.

Negative results: One of the 441 volunteers died from a heart attack (the scientists pinky swore that it totally had, like, nothing to do with malaria); during the Nuremberg trial, sucky Nazis attempted to use the Statesville experiment to defend their malarial infection experiments on… you know… not volunteers… at Dachau.

Positive results: Hearty support from the American public enabled the testing to continue for 29 years. The experiments were instrumental in pioneering modern malaria treatments.

Time Period: 1952

Problem: “Hey, does anyone understand cancer? I just… I don’t get it.” – Chester M. Southam, Sloan-Kettering Institute

Solution: “Okay, okay… I’m gonna go down to Ohio State Prison with a bunch of needles filled with live cancer cells, inject the cells into hundreds of unknowing inmates and then… see what happens, I guess?”

Results: “Nope. I still don’t get it…”

Time Period: 1955

Problem: Is America prepared to deal with biological warfare? The CIA does that hand-tilting “sorta” gesture that people do when they mean “no.”

Solution: U.S. boats off the coast of Tampa Bay, Florida, fire a chunky dose of whooping cough toward the city.

Negative results: Tampa suffers a massive whooping cough epidemic that infects 1,080 citizens, resulting in 12 deaths.

Positive results: The government’s worst fear – a “baker’s dozen” casualty scenario – proves unfounded

Time period: 1956-1957

Problem: Could terrorists attack the country using a swarm of mosquitoes infected with either yellow or Dengue fever?

Solution: Release millions of uninfected mosquitoes in Savannah, Georgia, and Avon Park, Florida, and monitor the insects’ impact and range.

Negative results: Once released, the “uninfected” mosquitoes naturally contracted all sorts of contagious horribleness, leading to outbreaks of typhoid, encephalitis and other miscellaneous fevers. As the diseases spread, Army workers disguised as public health officials tested and photographed suffering citizens. Scientists later admitted that the experiment was a “terrible idea.”

Positive results: Some of the Army guys were allowed to keep their victim cameras.

Time period: 1962

Problem: “Hey, does anyone understand cancer yet? Man, this is frustrating!” – Chester M. Southam, Sloan-Kettering Institute

Solution: “Okay, okay… I’m gonna go down to Brooklyn’s Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital with a bunch of needles filled with live cancer cells, inject the cells into 22 unknowing patients and then… see what happens, I guess?”

Positive result: Southam’s medical license was suspended for a year after the hospital tried to cover up the doctor’s experiment.

Negative result: Two years later, Southam was elected head of the National Cancer Society.

Friday: Matt retreats back to conventional prose when confronted with government-run chemical experiments and psychological torture

This Week, It’s All in Your Heads – Mass Hysteria, Rampant Psychosomaticism and Contagious Hypochondria

Today: When Mirth Turns Malady – Dancing Plagues and Laughter Epidemics

It’s 1518 in Strasbourg, France. A lone woman dances in the street, pitching and twirling, her kinetic bodily enthusiasm clashing with her wide-eyed panicked expression. By the end of the week, 34 others have joined her, all of them endlessly swaying and skipping and lurching along to irresistible, inaudible music; it’s as if they’ve been hexed by the vengeful ghost of a forgotten melody. Soon, a morass of physicians is brought in to diagnose the sudden outbreak of rug-cutting insanity. They conclude that the condition is almost certainly a blood disease curable only through continuous dancing – the afflicted must boogaloo their sickness into remission. Bands are hired. A stage is built. Three weeks later, more than 400 hundred groaning, fear-stricken bodies flail and jitter through town. This is the dancing plague of 1518, an epidemic that only ended after a majority of the participants dropped dead from heart attacks, exhaustion and strokes.

Today, the dancing plague remains an enduring medical curiosity. Doctors have suggested phenomena ranging from ergotism (poisoning via a specific psychotropic bread mold) to chorea (a then-common movement disorder resulting from rheumatism) as possible, but unlikely, culprits, while other scholars have suggested that acute religious mania could be to blame. The most rationally palatable explanation seems to be Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI), a form of mass hysteria catalyzed by extended periods of widespread psychological stress – exactly the type of stress that Strasbourg endured throughout the fifteen-teens as a result of unprecedented famine, disease and, of course, religious torment from that incorrigible Roman Empire.

Frustratingly incomprehensible outbreaks of manic behavior, especially among superstitious or fervently religious populations, are not uncommon. In 1962, three Tanzanian schoolgirls began to laugh uncontrollably. The chorus of inexplicable guffawing spread to the girls’ classmates, who passed it along to their families, who managed to reduce over 1,000 individuals to gasping, rib-tickled jumbles of exhausted, teary-eyed chortling. A combination of village-wide quarantines and time eventually felled the laughing sickness, but to this day no definitive cause has been discovered.

These are just two examples of bizarre socially contagious mental illnesses, and the exacting power of mind over matter that allows them to propagate. Come back Wednesday for a closer look at the hows and whys of mass hysteria, this time in the delightful form of Genital Retraction Syndrome.

It took 2,500 years but investigators finally cracked the case of out what killed an Egyptian woman. What makes this particularly interesting is how recent DNA extraction techniques made it possible to extract fragments of tuberculosis bacteria DNA. She had been misdiagnosed just a decade earlier as having been killed by ovarian cancer.

After analyzing ancient DNA from tissue samples, Helen D. Donoghue of University College London and colleagues say that the mummified woman, who lived around 600 B.C. and was entombed in Thebes, died of tuberculosis, not ovarian cancer.

link: Observatory – Revising the Diagnosis Behind an Ancient Death – NYTimes.com

Medicine Net.com:

A syndrome of distorted space, time and body image. The patient with the Alice in Wonderland syndrome has a feeling that their entire body or parts of it have been altered in shape and size. The syndrome is usually associated with visual hallucinations. The majority of patients with the syndrome have a family history of migraine headache or have overt migraine themselves.

The syndrome was first described in 1955 by the English psychiatrist John Todd (1914-1987). Todd named it, of course, for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Perhaps not coincidentally, Lewis Carroll suffered from severe migraine. Also known as a Lilliputian hallucination.

Thanks to everyone who helped out with the chat today! See you next week!

Time to get your shots in order, we are delving into the weirdest diseases in the world on this week’s edition of WTitW.

Here are the rules:

- The disease has to be medically verified.
- The visual the better.
- This is NOT a contest for the grossest disease ever, so therefore we are disqualifying all flesh eating bacteria and the like.

Email all submissions to JustinRobertYoung@Gmail. I’ll see you kids in the Weird Things TinyChat room at 5:30 p.m. EST where we will hash out the ultimate champion.

Your baseline is hypertrichosis or as it’s more commonly known, Werewolf Disease. Mainly because they’re the only people on the planet who would scoff at the beards I grow. Let’s get down with the sickness.

Image Credit: j_naturalia_2

We know what you’re thinking, and no the Bird People have not decided to rise up against their human overlords….yet. The photo above depicts an individual fashioning the get up Plague Doctors wore when visiting patients during the Black Death in the 14th Century.

1/3 of the population of Europe was wiped out by the plague and the costume definitely reflects the creepiness of the times. Plague Doctors wore the frightening get up to mitigate their chances of catching the highly infectious disease, think of it as an archaic hazmat suit.

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