10 Peculiar Diseases and Syndromes

1. Flesh-eating bacteria

Anything that can turn flesh to mush in a matter of hours demands respect. Necrotizing fasciitis, commonly called flesh-eating bacteria, can do just that and it can infect pretty much anybody at any time. It can enter your body through any minor injury: cut, bruise, scrape, or blister. It can also be contracted during surgery. Some have even caught the nasty bug after a bad paper cut. Flesh-eating bacteria eats away the soft tissue underneath the skin, killing both skin and flesh, which simply rots away. It can be especially ravenous, consuming the flesh of whole limbs or large patches of skin in short periods of time.

The flesh-eating bacterial strain is difficult to identify because it often resembles run-of-the-mill minor infections until it’s too late. Early symptoms can include pain in the infected limb (usually disproportionate to the actual injury), swelling and flu-like malaise. As the infection progresses, skin will become dark and covered with black, puss-filled blisters and the body may go into shock from the toxins that the bacteria release. Blood pressure will eventually drop as they body succumbs to the bacteria. Without treatment, the infection is deadly.
There are some absolutely gruesome images of the flesh eating bacteria at work but for the sake of those who have recently eaten, none have been included. Between 500 and 1,500 cases are reported every year in the United States and the horrifyingly high fatality rate is about 30%

2. Pica

This is a compulsive appetite for non-edible items, including clay, stones, cigarette ash, paint, glue, laundry starch, ice and even hair. Found among pregnant women and young children, particularly in poorer areas, it’s thought to relate to nutritional deficiencies and may be treated with mineral supplements. However, that’s just one of many theories about pica, whose precise causes are unknown. It’s also found among brain damaged or mentally ill people, among whom it can take particularly dangerous turns including swallowing sharp objects

3. Foreign Accent Syndrome

Imagine suddenly putting on a convincing French accent. Or Scottish. Or Italian. It sounds like fun, but it’s no joke for the victims of Foreign Accent Syndrome, which can set in after strokes or other brain trauma. Without warning, they’ll start speaking their native tongue with a different accent, which could sound anything from Swedish to South African. Victims need never have heard the accent in question, according to Oxford University researchers Dr Jennifer Gurd and Dr John Coleman, who believe it arises from damage to areas of the brain responsible for language production, altering pitch, pronunciation and speech patterns. So people with the syndrome aren’t putting on a foreign accent, it just sounds that way.

3. Alien Hand Syndrome

Another condition arising from brain trauma, this bizarre syndrome involves losing control of one hand, which can do anything from gesticulating to unbuttoning clothes its owner is trying to put on with his or her other hand. The condition is also called Dr Strangelove Syndrome, thanks to Peter Sellers’ inspired performance as Dr Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film. Sellers’s mechanical hand alternated between throttling himself and throwing Nazi salutes. While victims can still experience sensation in the affected hand, they say it seems to have a mind of its own. The only solution is to keep it busy, for example by holding onto something – just not, hopefully, your own throat.

4. Capgras Syndrome

A loved one has been stolen by a doppelganger; sounds like a movie about alien abduction. But for sufferers of Capgras Syndrome, the action occurs only in their brains, not outer space. This syndrome involves the delusion that a significant other, such as a parent, spouse or other relative, is being impersonated by an imposter. Sufferers sometimes attack the supposed double. The delusion can also extend even to oneself, with the person convinced that the reflection in the mirror is that of an imposter. While extremely rare, it is linked with brain damage, psychotic disorders and various neurological problems that somehow interfere with normal face recognition abilities. The syndrome owes its name to the French psychiatrist who first described it.

5. Hypertrichosis

People with hypertrichosis, a congenital condition involving hair growing all over the body – including eyelids and even ears, which can sprout long curls – have always attracted enormous interest, especially as sideshow stars. Probably the most famous was JoJo the Dog-Faced Boy (aka Fedor Jeftichew, a Russian recruited by showman P.T. Barnum), who toured widely during the latter half of the 19th century. There are different forms of hypertrichosis, distinguished by varying hair type, quantity and distribution. Some cases also have a little hairy appendage called a faun tail.

6. Riley-day Syndrome

Feeling no pain; it doesn’t sound like a problem, but it can be lethal for the victims of a syndrome involving, among other symptoms, insensitivity to pain. Caused by a chromosomal abnormality found among Ashkenazi Jews – people of Eastern European Jewish descent – the syndrome makes its victims exceptionally accident-prone because they simply don’t register warning signs of tissue damage such as wounds, bruising and burns. They are even oblivious to oxygen deprivation, which means that when they hold their breath, as infants often do, they do so until they black out. Riley-Day patients tend to die young – around half before the age of 30 – from their injuries.

7. Genital Retraction Syndrome aka Koro

Koro is one of a number of names for a hysterical condition known medically as Genital Retraction Syndrome, whose victims become convinced that their genitals are disappearing into their bodies. It can be contagious, sparking off “penis panics”, such as the one that overtook Singapore in 1967 in which thousands of men became convinced that their penises were being stolen; it was contained by a complete media blackout on the condition. Often blamed on witchcraft, Koro typically strikes in less developed parts of the world, including Africa and Asia, where belief in sorcery remains strong. It’s thought to be an extreme overreaction to normal genital shrinking from cold or other causes. Koro can be treated with medical reassurance and anti-anxiety medications.

8. Trimethylaminuria

Trimethylaminuria, or TMAU for short, is a rare genetic disease that causes a defect in the body’s ability to normally produce Flavin containing monooxygenase 3 (FMO3). No big deal, right? Unfortunately not, though relatively harmless, Trimethylaminuria causes an offensive body odor that resembles rotting eggs and is released in the person’s sweat, urine and breath, giving off a strong fishy odor.

9. Patulous Eustachian Tube

Patulous Eustachian tube is the name of a rare physical disorder where the Eustachian tube, which is normally closed, instead stays intermittently open. As a result, when it is open, all of the patient’s breathing, talking, swallowing, heart beat, etc. vibrates directly on the ear drum creating an effect that sounds like the patient has a bucket on his/her head.

10. Cotard delusion

The Cotard delusion or Cotard’s syndrome, also known as nihilistic or negation delusion, is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that he or she is dead, does not exist, is putrefying or has lost his/her blood or internal organs. Rarely, it can include delusions of immortality.

It is named after Jules Cotard (1840–1889), a French neurologist who first described the condition, which he called le delire de negation (”negation delirium”), in a lecture in Paris in 1880.
In this lecture, Cotard described a patient with the moniker of Mademoiselle X, who denied the existence of God, the Devil, several parts of her body and denied she needed to eat. Later she believed she was eternally damned and could no longer die a natural death.

A modern-day case of Cotard delusion occured in 1996. A patient suffered brain injury after a motorcycle accident and in January, 1990, after his discharge from hospital in Edinburgh, his mother took him to South Africa. He was convinced that he had been taken to hell (which was confirmed by the heat), and that he had died of septicaemia (which had been a risk early in his recovery), or perhaps from AIDS (he had read a story in The Scotsman about someone with AIDS who died from septicaemia), or from an overdose of a yellow fever injection. He thought he had “borrowed my mother’s spirit to show me round hell”, and that he was asleep in Scotland.

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