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Man attacked by brain-eating worm given only 30 minutes to live

Luis Ortiz, a California college student, was suddenly struck by a crippling headache and became very ill. His mother rushed him to the emergency room of a Napa hospital where neurosurgeon Soren Singel ran a brain scan. What he saw was terrifying.

A tapeworm larva was eating into Luis’s brain and unless something was done immediately he had only 30 minutes to live! Ortiz was rushed to emergency surgery where the still-wriggling parasite was extracted. Here is video of an interview that CBS News did with this fortunate survivor.

According to this report by the US centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) these larval cysts in the brain – neurocysticercosis – can develop after a person swallows microscopic eggs passed in the faeces of a person who has an intestinal pork tapeworm. They can also come from swimming in infested water.

The eggs hatch inside the body and the worms sometimes make their way to the brain. According to the CDC approximately 1,000 people end up in the hospital with these larvae. Few are such an extreme case as this Luis.

You can’t go through life worrying all the time about brain-eating worms, but clearly there are a few things we should pay attention to. Cook that pork! Be cautious where you swim. Try not to eat people’s faeces, especially people who eat raw pork!

We are glad that Luis survived this ordeal. What a terrifying experience! If you’ve had an amazing medical encounter, tell us.

Saul Ravencraft's signature

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Flame on—spontaneous human combustion

A recent rash of news articles has focused on the strange case of the nine-day-old child of Karna Perumal, an agricultural labourer, and his wife Rajeswari from T. Parangini in Villuppuram district of Tamil Nadu. According to some, this baby was a victim of Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC), a condition where a person bursts into flames, apparently without any external cause. This incident is, understandably, controversial, so I’m not going to focus on it today, but it’s not the only case of SHC to get attention. Here is video of a case involving a highly decorated Vietnam War veteran who survived an incident when his feet burst into flames.

The idea of SHC began appearing in fiction as early as 1834. Charles Dickens even used the concept in his story Bleak House.

Does this really happen? We’re honestly not sure. It’s just another weird mystery in our wonderfully weird world!

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Bizarre medicine

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Punishment? No! Cure! This cage was a 1909 treatment for Arteriosclerosis. Click the picture for the article in a 1909 science magazine.

There may be a reason why what doctors do is called “practice.” While medicine has become a more rigorous science over time, the history of medicine is filled with things that would have you swear that people were just making things up.

The picture shows a man in a cage. It’s not some sort of medieval torture, it’s a device that was designed to treat Arteriosclerosis. The cage is attached to some electrical equipment that would make Victor Von Frankenstein proud.

Of course, while we laugh at some of these crazy medical practices of the past, we may not be much better today. In the far future will people look with horror on how we used radiation and chemicals to battle disease? Will what we see as the most sophisticated and compassionate medical techniques look like poking holes in people’s skulls with a rock to let out the bad spirits?

Here’s a video featuring 10 of the most bizarre medical practices in history.

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UPDATE: The Creature From The Tuna Can Is More Horrifying Than You Could Ever Imagine!

louseRemember a few days ago when we learned about the scary creature that turned us all into vegetarians (or at least tuna brand snobs)? Well, scientist have looked into it, and it turns out this creature is far more terrifying than any of us could have come up with.

Stuart Hine, a veteran from the Natural History Museum in London said that this thing was a Cymotha Exigua, otherwise known as the “tongue-eating louse”.

I’m sure you can deduct how it got its nickname, but let me further explain so you can rest assured you won’t sleep tonight. This parasite enters the fish through its gills, then lives inside of it, attaches itself to the tongue, then slowly eats away at the tongue until it becomes the whole tongue, Xenomorph style.

The UK tuna company is looking into quality control to keep all Xenomorph monsters out of their tuna can, and apologize for scaring half the world to death.

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I’M NEVER EATING TUNA AGAIN! Woman Finds Scary Yet Cute Creature in her Tuna.

Good lord. I can’t even keep my cool as I write this, but a woman named Zoe Butler from the UK bought an off brand can of Tuna and got more than she ever could have “bargained” for.

tuna-creature

She opened up her can of tuna to find A CREATURE STARING BACK AT HER OH MY GOD. Look at that, that’s horrifying, with it’s eyes staring into my soul.

Once I recover from my tuna induced PSTD, I’ll gladly stick to Chicken of the Sea brand from here on, so I can avoid having this thing chill with me on my kitchen table.

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It’s actually kind of cute.

 

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The University of Texas is Short a Few Brains

That’s the kind of headline that I’m pretty sure is going up in newspapers at rival school Texas A&M, whose rivalry with UT goes back to 1915, a rivalry so well known as to have been featured on a Wheaties box. Lots of jokes almost certainly are currently making the rounds there about a shortage of brain-power and so forth. But the truth behind the japes is pretty weird.

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The Austin State Hospital (an asylum) has been around since the 1800s. From the 50s to the 80s the head pathologist was collecting abnormal brains from his autopsies on mental patients housed there. Forget about all your ‘mad scientist’ imaginings, it was all pretty standard. After gathering about 200 of them, it was decided that space was too limited at the hospital. After a bit of a contest with Harvard Medical School, the brains were donated to UT’s Animal Resource Center. They were looked at as an important research tool, being used to examine how those with mental illnesses brains differed from the normal ones and how such diseases impacted the ol’ grey matter. Included in the batch was even the brain of Charles Whitman, who infamously in 1966 took a sniper rifle to the top of the UT tower and killed 16 people.

In 2013 a photographer, Adam Voorhes, who had found out about the collection, started photographing them and discovered that some of them were missing. And not just a few. HALF of the collection. He and a journalist, Alex Hannaford, began the quest to discover what had happened to them. But there seems to be no small amount of confusion about it.

In the mid-90s, Dr. Jerry Fineg, the Center’s director at the time, asked the collection’s curator, Tim Schallert, to move half the jars elsewhere to make more room. When he went to do so, he discovered the collection was no longer complete. He asked Fineg about it and he reportedly told Schallert that he got rid of many of them, although he never told him where. Why he would have asked Schallert in the first place to move the brains when he already knew he had is another question entirely. Fineg, now retired, was asked where they went and he told the questers that as far as he knew they were sent back to the Austin State Hospital…by Schallert. Schallert of course denies it. The Hospital says when they originally gave the brains to UT was the last they saw of them…and the circle goes ever on.

“I have been racking my BRAIN trying to remember where those brains went and although ASH says they know nothing about them I still believe that is where they went … SORRY.” said the now retired Fineg to Hannaford in a recent email. Not sure why the Austin State Hospital would lie about it…UNLESS THE INMATES ARE RUNNING THE ASYLUM!! Hey, UT, did a guy named Igor come by asking about the brain of Abby Normal?

You can read more about the mystery in the book published by Voorhes and Hannaford, “Malformed: Forgotten Brains of the Texas State Mental Hospital”. Will we ever solve the mystery? I bet Texas A&M hopes we don’t.

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That Stuffed Nose Might Actually be a GIANT LEECH!

I don’t know if this is technically Halloweeny…it’s certainly the grossest story I’ve come across at least since the Rat Kings. Check out the unfortunate story of Scottish citizen Daniela Liverani. After a sightseeing trip through the lovely countryside of Vietnam, Daniela noticed her nose was bleeding a bit. Not thinking much of it, after returning to Edinburg, she saw something sticking out of her nose as far as her lip as she stepped out of the shower. She thought it was a blood clot. But no. No no no NO NO NO NO NO

leech

This…3 INCH LEECH…was living in her nose. For maybe, like WEEKS.

…..

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

*ahem*

Said Daniela, “I saw him so many times but I just sniffed him back up. I tried to blow him out and grab him but I couldn’t get a grip of him before he retreated back up my nose.” I’m baffled that it took as long as it did to realize something was HORRIBLY, HORRIBLY WRONG: “I jumped out of the shower to look really closely in the mirror and I saw ridges on him. That’s when I realized he was an animal. My friend Jenny and I called NHS 24 and were told to get to accident and emergency as soon as possible.”

Yeah, no kidding.

Very freaked out doctors used a flashlight, tweezers and forceps to extract the slimy creature: “The doctor used a nose forceps to prise my nostrils open really wide – it was agony. The nurse and Jenny pinned me down to the bed. Whenever the doctor grabbed him, I could feel tugging at the inside of my nose. Then all of a sudden, after about half an hour, the pain stopped and the doctor had the leech in the tweezers. He was about as long as my forefinger but as fat as my thumb. He could move so fast as well, which freaked me out. I’ve no idea how he got up there but he’d have got bigger and bigger from feeding on my blood.”

Please, let me take this moment to reiterate…

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

…as it were.

The doctor informed Daniela that if they had waited much longer the leech could very well have eaten its way into her brain. In relation to how this happened in the first place (seriously), Mark Siddal, curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and an expert on leeches said: “Daniela could have picked up this leech from water in Vietnam, if she had been swimming. “Or it could have gone in through her mouth, as she was drinking water. Even though it was there for around a month, these leeches don’t grow all that quickly, so it wouldn’t have been much smaller when it went up there. It would have been quite sizeable. It’s interesting that people don’t feel these leeches go up their nose.”

Yes…interesting. Erg. HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Sleep tight. Wear nose plugs. Especially in third-world countries.

woman-leech-nose

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The Walking Dead….Syndrome

There are a lot of seriously strange neurological disorders out there. The brain is a barely understood piece of wet ware that can get all freaky and out of balance with disturbing ease. There’s the Palinopsia Disorder where the after image left in the eye after seeing bright images won’t go away sometimes for days afterwards. Or folks who suffer from Dysmimia who can only not comprehend or even realize what’s happened with hand signals. Or even the famous Stendahl Syndrome (there’s even a movie about it) where one can experience vivid hallucinations when being exposed to good art. But the weirdest, and most disturbing neurological disorder I’ve yet encountered, has to be Cotard’s Delusion, often referred to as “The Walking Corpse Syndrome”.

cotard

The condition was named after the French neurologist Jules Cotard who in 1880 had a middle-aged patient who believed she had ‘no brain, no nerves, no chest, no stomach, no intestines’ and was ‘nothing more than a decomposing body’. More dangerous, she thought she couldn’t die a ‘natural’ death so had no need to eat. Cases had been described in medical texts before this; 100 years earlier a woman demanded her family dress her in a shroud and put her in a coffin.

“[T]he ‘dead woman’ became agitated and began to scold her friends vigorously for their negligence in not offering her this last service; and as they hesitated even longer, she became extremely impatient, and began to press her maid with threats to dress her as a dead person. Eventually everybody thought it was necessary to dress her like a corpse and to lay her out in order to calm her down. The old lady tried to make herself look as neat as possible, rearranging tucks and pins, inspecting the seam of her shroud, and was expressing dissatisfaction with the whiteness of her linen. In the end she fell asleep, and was then undressed and put into bed.”

cotard

There have been many cases of Cotard’s Delusion since and many of come to tragic ends, dying from starvation or even extreme suicides, like pouring acid on themselves. But a new case in 2004, and the chance to study it with modern equipment, has started to reveal some answers. A man named Graham Harrison tried to commit suicide by electrocution and failed. When he became conscious, much had changed.

“When I was in hospital I kept on telling them that the tablets weren’t going to do me any good ’cause my brain was dead. I lost my sense of smell and taste. I didn’t need to eat, or speak, or do anything. I ended up spending time in the graveyard because that was the closest I could get to death.”

After being examined by a number of doctors, the case was passed to Dr Adam Zeman, a neurologist at the University of Exeter, and Dr Steven Laureys, a neurologist at University of Liège, who gave Graham a PET scan.

“Graham’s brain function resembles that of someone during anaesthesia or sleep. Seeing this pattern in someone who is awake is quite unique to my knowledge”, said Dr. Laureys. “I’ve been analysing PET scans for 15 years and I’ve never seen anyone who was on his feet, who was interacting with people, with such an abnormal scan result”.

With a patient base of one, only the most tentative of conclusions can be made about the delusion, which has been linked to bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia. A mixture of psychotherapy and drug treatment, using anti-depressants and anti-psychotics, has helped Graham, but he still finds himself sitting in graveyards: “The police would come and get me, though, and take me home”.

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Healer Licks Eyeballs to Cure Patients

There’s no shortage of ‘miracle healers’ out there. None are given much credence by the scientific community. As the American Cancer Society has stated, “available scientific evidence does not support claims that faith healing can actually cure physical ailments.” But that doesn’t stop folks who have been seeking miraculous cures from the blessed for centuries upon centuries. Generally speaking it’s referred to as ‘the laying on of hands’. But one woman in Bosnia lays on her tongue. On eyeballs.

eyeball-licking

Hava Cebic lives in a small village in northern Bosnia, is 77 years old, and folks come far and wide to have her lick their eyes. She claims she can cure about anything with her ‘golden tongue’, that she hopes will be preserved after her death (which probably isn’t that far away; she’s 77) to keep helping people.

When Hava was a little girl, she discovered she had the power to help when her brother complained of dry eyes, and jokingly she held them down and licked them. When he claimed he could see better after that, she knew she had a strange gift. Trying it with others (that would have been an interesting conversation to be a fly on the wall for) she found that her lick could cure allergies, dry and tired eyes, conjunctivitis, ocular hypertension and could even relieve the effects of other more serious eye conditions.

“Now, whenever anyone has something stuck in their eye or whatever, they come to me,” said Hava. “They come from different towns and villages and in a minute or two, their problem is solved. But I always make sure I wash my tongue in alcohol before or after an eye lick.”

Hava never asks for anything for her help but people give sizable donations anyway. But I gotta ask: if the cure is the tongue, why does it specifically only seem to work with eyes? Did she try licking other body parts? I’m not trying to be risque or anything, but seriously, even though the scientific method is clearly not involved in this situation, a little trial and error seems like it would have been called for. Still, it’s all kind yuck. I’d have some about of trepidation letting a 77 year old woman lick me anywhere much less my eyeballs. Just not my kind of kink.

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Man Wakes From Coma Speaking Fluent Mandarin Chinese

Ok, so those of us searching for real-life super-human abilities have comes to terms with the unlikeliness of it. I mean, since irradiating oneself (or getting bitten by something irradiated) has disappointingly proven to only lead to fatal  tumors instead of wall-crawling or smashing abilities, we must face the facts that comic books have lied to us. No super-powers for us.

...but wait, what’s this?

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Meet Australia’s Ben McMahon. Ben was just your everyday High School student until one day he was bit by a radioactive car crash…well, ok, he was IN a car crash. After spending a week in a coma that doctors were unsure he would pull out of, Ben woke up…changed. Even though a native English speaker, Ben woke up unable to speak anything but very fluent Mandarin Chinese.

“Most of it’s hazy, but when I woke up seeing a Chinese nurse, I thought I was in China,” said McMahon. “It was like a dream. It was surreal. It was like my brain was in one place but my body was in another. I just started speaking Chinese – they were the first words that left my mouth.” It took Ben a few days but his English came back to him. However, he didn’t lose a whit of his new ability.

Ben has gone on to conduct Chinese tours of Melbourne, hosts a local Mandarin TV show, and now is attending University in Shanghai. While he briefly studied the language in school, it wasn’t anywhere near enough of a study to explain his new verbal skills. And Ben isn’t the only one.

Multiple people in the past have woken up from brain injuries with new fluency in a language, musical or mathematical prodigy skills or even super-strength and the ability to fly.

Ok, not those last two. But here’s hoping. I’m going to go home and construct my catapult next to my brick wall now in prep. Anyone out there good at sewing spandex?