Disease Of The Week

Anger🤬 car crashes🚔 depression😟 and low energy🥱 are all caused by insomnia. The Ancient Greeks wrote about it and the modern Greeks devised the official medical measure (The Athens Insomnia Scale in case it comes up in a pub quiz). Insomnia causes misery for millions of people. Sleep is deeply complex and not entirely understood […]

What do humans and Bedlington Terriers have in common? Answer: They can both suffer from excess copper – a genetic (and potentially fatal) condition called Wilson’s disease. We get copper from foods like chocolate, nuts, shellfish and mushrooms. A human (or dog) with Wilson’s disease cannot dispose of any excess, and over time it builds

Featured in a Sherlock Holmes novel – St Vitus’ dance is an autoimmune disease caused by streptococcus infection. Symptoms include involuntary and random movements of the face, hands and feet. No one knows why it never affects the eye muscles, or why movements cease during sleep. St Vitus is the patron saint of dancers, tortured

Smoking and picked vegetables – both increase the risk of stomach cancer🥒🚬 Like many cancers, it is treatable if caught early. Unfortunately it usually has no symptoms until the cancer cannot be cured😟 In the UK the number of people who have survived for 5 years or more after being diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer

Helmuth Gufler of the Austrian police, has described the grisly discovery of a corpse of an elderly lady hidden in a cellar. Her son had covered her body in cat litter to hide the smell so he could claim £42,000 in pension payments after his mum died of natural causes. The crime came to light

Poisonous spider bites are increasing in the UK from the Noble False Widow 🕷️ Bites aren’t deadly – unlike its lookalike the Black Widow, but have caused school closures and even cardiac arrests. The False Widow doesn’t drink water – instead thriving from the liquid inside its prey – which it wraps (alive) in a

A rare cancer that permeates the bone appearing as a moth eaten effect on x-rays is called Ewing Sarcoma. You can just about make out this moth eaten effect on this x-ray from Dr M Richardson In the UK, an average of only 6 children a year are diagnosed, including a girl from Hull who

Pope Gregory the Great (590AD) denounced leprosy as a punishment for sinful behaviour. Actually it is caused by a bacteria, and spread by inhaling droplets from someone’s nose.The bacteria prevents the suffer feeling pain in their extremities – which can become permanently damaged (or drop off) over time due to repeated injuries, infection and unnoticed