10 Really Weird and Awful Diseases

1. Elephantiasis

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Lymphatic filiriasis, best known as Elephantiasis is characterized by an awful picture of swollen arms and legs. Mosquitoes are responsible for spreading this disease on over 120 million people currently. With their bite they inject warm larvae, such as Wuchereria bancrofti, Brugia malayi, and B. timori, which actually cause the illness. Unfortunately, the “guests” in the blood can survive there for years. Despite the arms and legs, breasts and genitalia are also enlarged. There are still experiments for finding the cure but it’s not found yet.

2. Pica

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This disorder makes people insatiable for non-food materials, such as soil, clay, feces, paper, glue, gum, coal, etc. It’s not clear yet what causes it, but there are assumptions that it is linked with mineral deficiency, especially iron. There’s no cure for it yet, but there are some medications that could reduce the symptoms to some patients.

3. Alice in Wonderland Syndrome

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Alice was really in Wonderland, sometimes she was seeing small things, sometimes they were much bigger than her, but people with Alice in Wonderland Syndrome look too small and too big whatever the object is. For example, they see their own house with size of their dog’s house, they can see a bird big as dinosaur, etc. This perception disorder is a result of change in perception as opposed to the eyes themselves malfunctioning. There are medicaments that reduce the symptoms significantly.

 

4. Walking Corpse Syndrome

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Patients are not real walking corpses, they just think they are so. This syndrome is a mix of mental depression and suicidal tendencies. People think they have lost everything, from possessions to parts of their bodies. Most bizarre – most of them believe they’re walking corpses. They often say that they can smell their own flesh and feel worms entering in their bodies. Unfortunately antidepressants don’t help too much in treating this disease and there’s not other usable cure.

 

5. Vampire Disease

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Although their skin is blistering when the Sun touches it, these people don’t drink blood and are not vampires. However, they prefer to avoid any contact with the Sun, as acute attack of it can be fatal. There are several cure for this disease, every of them is used depending on the causes of it.

 

6. Aquagenic Urticaria

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 Aquagenic Urticaria is commonly known as water allergy, although it’s not allergy at all. It is very rare disease in which the patient becomes sensitive to non-distilled water what means feeling great pain when contact with it. The worst part is that they mustn’t cry if they don’t want their pain to grow, as tears have the same effect. Unfortunately, there’s no cure yet.

 

7. Necrotizing Fascilitis

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 This is a terrible disease. Fortunately it is very rare, but the mortality rate of 73% is another awful characteristic of it. It is caused by eating bacteria that could enter the skin through the smallest paths and once it gets in, it never gets out. The bacteria then start its way and eat whatever finds on its path. The skin looks rusty, but in extreme even losing body parts is possibility.

 

8. Progeria

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The disease better known as Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome is genetic failure that causes living life on fast forward. Patients die on average of 13 years. Before that they experience some things that later life brings, such as baldness and heart diseases. It happens once in eight million births. As it was mentioned before, genetic failure causes this, so there’s no cure.

 

9. Exploding Head Syndrome

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If you thought that your head gonna explode when you had a headache, you were wrong. Patients with exploding head syndrome hear explosions, gunshots, screams and other noises, causing anxiety, fear and increasing heart rate. All of this happens 2-3 hours after falling asleep. Although this syndrome’s etiology is still unknown, there are some findings that it is related with stress and fatigue, so there are a lot of medicaments that clear the explosions from head.

 

10. Human Werewolf Syndrome

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 Hypertricosis, or Human Werewolf Syndrome, is disorder which characterize with growth of hair body that is particularly abnormal. There are two types of the disease: the first one covers with hair certain area of the body, the other one – the entire body. There is no cure that prevent the hair grow, all patients can do is to remove the body hair.