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The Scaremongering Thread, now with 300% (or possibly 1/10000%) the alternative medicine!
joshofalltrades
Class TraitorSmoke-filled roomRegistered User regular
Class TraitorSmoke-filled roomRegistered User regular
There's usually a scary story thread, or a thread on Slenderman or the SCP Foundation, but that stuff is all made up. We live in a very frightening world which does not require fiction in order to scare the living bejeezus out of you. I'm constantly surprised by the things I find out about, either just randomly chatting with forumers here or through my own dedicated internet research (read: being bored and having nothing better to do) that are god damn frightening. And I'm not just talking about Australia, although for a certainty 95% of the things in this world that are borne from the colon of the great Satan himself call Australia home.
I'll just give an example to start things off.
Naegleria fowleri
This is a protist, and it might be the scariest one in the entire world. Sure it looks like a blob in that picture, but what you don't know is just how much it will kill the ever-loving piss out of you.
N. fowleri lives in fresh water, and so you're safe from this thing if you swim in the ocean (you're not safe from other things, but that's a different story). You might think that if you keep to your swimming pool you'll be fine, but another thing you don't know is how wrong you just were. N. fowleri has been known to inhabit recreational water sources (such as fresh water dams, reservoirs, lakes, etc.) and... drum roll please... poorly-chlorinated swimming pools. After you hear exactly what it does, any pool owner would be forgiven for turning their swimming pool into a chlorine chemical bath until the end of time.
It's true, it's rare that a human is infected with this organism. But when it happens, there is a 98% fatality rate. Here's how it murders your guts. It invades your nostrils when they enter water containing this organism, causing necrosis of the olfactory bulbs as well as hemorrhaging on its way to make you dead. But that's just sort of a bonus feature.
It's on its way to your brain. So it can eat it.
Wikipedia describes the mechanism by which this happens as: "The organism begins to consume cells of the brain piecemeal by means of a unique sucking apparatus extended from its cell surface." Think about that for a second. What part is scarier? The "consume cells of the brain piecemeal" or "by means of a unique sucking apparatus"?
But Josh, you can just get to a hospital as soon as you notice something is wrong, right? WRONG. In the rare case where symptoms appear before this thing multiplies and kills you by eating your fucking brains, you have literally minutes before this hell-spawned piece of crap changes forms from a trophozoite to a flagellate, and once that happens in your brain and it starts feasting, you might as well just start writing your last will and goodbye letters to your friends and relatives, because this triggers the onset of primary amoebic meningoencephalitis. There's an antifungal drug called Amphotericin B which can kill this guy before PAM sets in, but survival rate after you are a PAM case is less than 1%. But most of the time, they don't even know this is what you had until they perform an autopsy on you and find out your brain is gone (actually they're probably still eating it at that point, but they can still culture it. Carefully).
Don't be too afraid. Between 2001 and 2010, only 32 infections of N. fowleri were reported in the US. Everybody who was infected died:
Youch, killed by a neti pot and tap water. Water way to go. (ba-dum-tish)
See you in your nightmares! Om nom nom nom...
I'll just give an example to start things off.
Naegleria fowleri
This is a protist, and it might be the scariest one in the entire world. Sure it looks like a blob in that picture, but what you don't know is just how much it will kill the ever-loving piss out of you.
N. fowleri lives in fresh water, and so you're safe from this thing if you swim in the ocean (you're not safe from other things, but that's a different story). You might think that if you keep to your swimming pool you'll be fine, but another thing you don't know is how wrong you just were. N. fowleri has been known to inhabit recreational water sources (such as fresh water dams, reservoirs, lakes, etc.) and... drum roll please... poorly-chlorinated swimming pools. After you hear exactly what it does, any pool owner would be forgiven for turning their swimming pool into a chlorine chemical bath until the end of time.
It's true, it's rare that a human is infected with this organism. But when it happens, there is a 98% fatality rate. Here's how it murders your guts. It invades your nostrils when they enter water containing this organism, causing necrosis of the olfactory bulbs as well as hemorrhaging on its way to make you dead. But that's just sort of a bonus feature.
It's on its way to your brain. So it can eat it.
Wikipedia describes the mechanism by which this happens as: "The organism begins to consume cells of the brain piecemeal by means of a unique sucking apparatus extended from its cell surface." Think about that for a second. What part is scarier? The "consume cells of the brain piecemeal" or "by means of a unique sucking apparatus"?
But Josh, you can just get to a hospital as soon as you notice something is wrong, right? WRONG. In the rare case where symptoms appear before this thing multiplies and kills you by eating your fucking brains, you have literally minutes before this hell-spawned piece of crap changes forms from a trophozoite to a flagellate, and once that happens in your brain and it starts feasting, you might as well just start writing your last will and goodbye letters to your friends and relatives, because this triggers the onset of primary amoebic meningoencephalitis. There's an antifungal drug called Amphotericin B which can kill this guy before PAM sets in, but survival rate after you are a PAM case is less than 1%. But most of the time, they don't even know this is what you had until they perform an autopsy on you and find out your brain is gone (actually they're probably still eating it at that point, but they can still culture it. Carefully).
Don't be too afraid. Between 2001 and 2010, only 32 infections of N. fowleri were reported in the US. Everybody who was infected died:
Wikipedia, yeah. Sorry. wrote:In October 2002, two Peoria, Arizona, five-year-olds died after being exposed to untreated water supplied by Rose Valley Water.
In August 2005, two Oklahoma boys, ages seven and nine, were killed by N. fowleri after swimming in the hot, stagnant water of lakes in the Tulsa area.
In 2007, six cases were reported in the U.S., all fatal.
August 2010, 7-year-old Kyle Lewis died from the brain-eating amoeba Naegleria fowleri after swimming in fresh water in Texas. The Kyle Lewis Amoeba Awareness Foundation was subsequently created to raise awareness of this amoeba and the deadly infection it causes.
In 2011, two Louisiana residents died after becoming infected by using neti pots with household tap water, leading to CDC recommendations against using untreated tap water.
Youch, killed by a neti pot and tap water. Water way to go. (ba-dum-tish)
See you in your nightmares! Om nom nom nom...
joshofalltrades on
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Everyone who has complaints about the stench can take it up with Josh there.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/krokodil-the-drug-that-eats-junkies-2300787.html
Googling this is a bad idea at work or if you have a weak stomach, these people have flesh that is literally rotting off their bodies.
uh
uh
As in, towards your heart.
Enough physical pressure, and it will pierce the heart, which I don't need to explain why that is a bad thing.
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so
stay off ladders
So, you're born basically with a knife pointed right at your heart, just waiting for someone to give it a little push.
As somebody who is deathly afraid of being stabbed, that is horrifying.
Stop being unfun
Start being scared at all of the stuff that will never actually kill you
Because it's fun to be scared
@Tube
What you know about Desumorphine
for real, yo
what
a funny
joke
You can go right to hell.
There are just things I don't need to know.
But it's fun when everybody is telling ghost stories and you can just laugh and say, "Ha, that stuff? That's stuff that kids are afraid of. This thing is real."
But you would look really silly with a flashlight under your face talking about Krokodil
also krokodil is horrifying
oh boy can we talk about how fucking terrifying mad cow disease is
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Just eat cows you know don't have it. Know your prey, don't become your prey.
Especially when you're just a lowly Microsoft rep trying to dissuade lines of people from looking at the WII U display.
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Wait, ate through his foot to the bone? Or bit? Because if it ate its way, how in the hell did that happen? If I was bitten I would be kicking like mad to get it off of me. Was it just that tenacious?
Or do I need to Google it now?
Fuck.
Prions are tiny, poorly-understood, protein-based invaders that kill you very slowly, usually in very strange and tragic ways. The most well-known prion disease is Creutzfeldt-Jakob, or Mad Cow disease in cattle; it kills you after anywhere from twenty to ? years. There is no cure. That is a statement you'll have to get used to if you study prions at all.
I find that the most sinister is one called Kuru. They call it the Laughing Sickness in Papua New Guinea, where it is endemic and was probably transmitted by cannibalism. It has an array of symptoms like slurred speech, shivers, and eventual loss of ambulation. It also causes severe depression, punctuated by fits of uncontrollable laughter. But the worst part is that this does not happen quickly; you're likely to live a year or two after symptoms first display.
You will live, horribly depressed, struck by laughter out of nowhere, as your body slowly withers and, covered with pus-filled, decaying sores, finally develops pneumonia, and you die, coughing and weeping and laughing and trembling in the grip of a tiny monster that's been inside you for anywhere from five to thirty years, long enough, at any rate, for you to have built a life worth living.
That's Kuru.
The lesson is, don't fucking eat people.
Bit, the tissue death was from the venom. The picture from it is after they cleaned/treated it but it's still fairly graphic.
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
Steam Profile | Signature art by Alexandra 'Lexxy' Douglass
steam | Dokkan: 868846562
Only in her brain.
It laid eggs and she got wicked headaches but I think she survived since that tapeworm was probably lost as fuck.
Wasn't that, like, the first episode of House?
But I need a rapid way to gain life force and these rats and snails just aren't cutting it any longer.
House did have an episode about a massive tapeworm though.
Naked and Alone is the show for self lovers.
Naked and Afraid is for masochists.
Also just be glad there aren't fungus that mind control us.. yet.
Oh, also, I'm giving away free mushrooms. They're delicious. And free.
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yeah
as I recall, it was about some teenager who couldn't feel pain so she just plain didn't know that there was a ten-foot tapeworm inside her
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