MEDICAL BAG
Twins from two wombs, the waters of youth and a metal-munching Indian weightlifter
DOUBLE BARREL (AGAIN!)
Kelsey Hatcher, 32, of Birmingham, Alabama, gave birth to twins in December 2023, each of which had undergone gestation in separate wombs. Hatcher had known since she was a teenager that she had the rare condition uterus didelphys, giving her two separate uteruses. This is found in less than 0.3 per cent of women, and it is rare for someone to be simultaneously pregnant in both. Hatcher gave birth to her first child on 19 December, and the second on the 20th, so the twins, girls whom she has named Roxi and Rebel, have different birthdays as well as coming from separate wombs. The first was delivered vaginally, but the second by C-section. There are less than 20 cases of uterus didelphys twins on record (see FT296:23 and 297:22 for some other cases), although in 2019 a woman in Bangladesh produced twins from one of her wombs a month after delivering a premature baby from the other, while in early 2023 Elle Ladowitz from Israel gave birth to a boy and a girl from separate wombs (FT436:15). BBC News, 23 Dec 2023.
The metal clumps were made up of 39 coins and 37 small magnets
MAGNETIC MUSCLES
An unnamed 26-year-old man was admitted to New Delhi’s Sir Ganga Ram Hospital complaining of abdominal pain and vomiting that had gone on for more than 20 days. When he was X-rayed, he was found to have two large metallic clumps blocking his small intestine, with a further clump in his stomach. Surgeons operated immediately to remove the blockages, which were lifethreatening, and found that the clumps were made up of 39 coins and 37 small magnets. In the small intestine, some of the magnets had locked together between the intestinal loops, causing holes to erode in the intestinal wall. The patient then spent seven days in hospital recovering. Questioned as to why he had swallowed the items, he explained that he was a weightlifter and believed they would give him a boost in zinc, which would help with his bodybuilding. While stomach acids will cause zinc to leach from things like coins, and the body will absorb it, the coins and magnets swallowed would have produced far more zinc than the body can handle. This causes zinc toxicity, which leads to stomach pains, diarrhoea and vomiting, and can potentially kill. nypost.com, 28 Feb 2024.
VACCINE ADDICT
Researchers from the University of ErlangenNuremberg have discovered a man from Magdeburg, Germany, who has had himself vaccinated against Covid 217 times. He had paid for the vaccines to be administered privately over a 29-month period and came to the attention of the university after a story about his vaccinations appeared in a local paper. “We contacted him and invited him to undergo various tests in Erlangen. He was very interested in doing so,” said Dr Kilian Schober from the university’s microbiology department. His team took blood and saliva samples and “We were able to use these samples to determine exactly how the immune system reacts to the vaccination,” said Schober. He was concerned that hyper-stimulation of the immune system might have fatigued key cells, but the medics found no sign of this, and no sign that the man had ever contracted Covid. However, Schober warned that: “Importantly, we do not endorse hyper-vaccination as a strategy to enhance adaptive immunity,” adding
that “current research indicates that a three-dose vaccination, coupled with regular top-up vaccines for vulnerable groups, remains the favoured approach. There is no indication that more vaccines are required.” Alerted by the publicity, the public prosecutor of the city of Magdeburg opened a fraud investigation, but decided not to bring criminal charges. BBC News, 5 Mar 2024.
SMOKIN’ BONES
In Sierra Leone and other countries in West Africa, a new drug, kush, is reported to have surged through the community, resulting in the death of at least a dozen people a week and the hospitalisation of thousands more. This is sometimes through overdoses but also from head injuries and road accidents as the so-called “zombie drug” causes users to fall asleep while walking, to fall over, and to wander into moving traffic. Kush is a mixture of cannabis, fentanyl, tramadol and formaldehyde, and according to legend, ground-up human bones. Most of these components have a sedative and euphoric effect, although formaldehyde can cause hallucinations, and both the presence and the effect of the human bones, allegedly sourced from grave robbers, is disputed. It has been suggested the bones have a high sulphur content, which is supposed to contribute to the drug’s effect, or that if the bones come from a dead kush user, they boost the content of the rest of the substances. However, neither seem likely; bones do not contain significant amounts of sulphur, and when burned produce highly toxic sulphur dioxide, not a psychoactive substance, while drug residues do not accumulate in bones to any significant extent. Elsewhere in Africa, similar “polydrugs” are popular; in South
Africa it is whoonga, also known as nyaope, a mixture of tobacco, cannabis, heroin and antiretroviral drugs used to treat Aids, some of which are hallucinogenic, and ‘white pipe’, a mixture of methaqualone (Mandrax), cannabis and tobacco. sciencealert.com, 16 Jan 2024.
HOARSE LEECH
A 53-year-old Vietnamese man believed his hoarse voice was the result of nothing more than a mild cold until he started to spit blood. Peering down his throat using a mirror, the man could only see a brown mass in his upper throat. Panicked, he went to the National Hospital of Endocrinology in Hanoi where doctors investigated using an endoscope. They discovered that the brown mass was, in fact, a 6cm (2.4in) leech locked onto his throat below the glottis, just above the entrance to his trachea. In trying to establish how the creature had ended up in the patient’s throat, medics found that he had injured his hand on a mouse trap about a month before and, as a follower of traditional Shennong herbal medicine, he had picked medicinal plants with which to treat his injury, and then chewed them into a paste that he applied to his wound. The wound healed without any trouble, but medics believe that because he did not wash the leaves, he had also managed to swallow a tiny leech that attached itself to his throat and rapidly grew by constantly feeding on his blood. odditycentral.com, 8 Mar 2024.
LAGOON OF YOUTH
After spending 100 days underwater in a pressurised 9m (30ft) square room 9m (30ft) down in a Florida lagoon, biomedical researcher Dr Joseph Dituri claims that he was “de-aged” by the experience. He says that blood tests showed that the levels of every inflammatory marker in his body had been halved by the experience and that his telomeres – structures on the end of chromosomes that normally erode through life – had got longer. “I’m 56 now. My extrinsic [biological] age was 44. When I got out of the water, my extrinsic age was 34, so, my telomeres lengthened. I actually got younger when I was under the water.” He also reported that he had shrunk in height by half an inch, reached 60-66 per cent rapid-eye movement sleep in comparison to 40 per cent before, and had his cholesterol drop by 72 points. Since he emerged from the chamber, Dituri says the length of his telomeres had fallen again, but they are still longer than when he went in. Dituri’s pod provided a hyperbaric environment, which involves living in an oxygen-saturated atmosphere at high pressure, something that is claimed to stimulate the growth of new blood vessels. During his underwater stint, Dituri was monitored by medical, psychological, and psychosocial experts and he believes it has implications far beyond extending life. “It’s an isolating confined extreme environment. And as humans, we really need to figure out how we’re going to be living in that (environment) if we’re going to expand our planet, if we’re going to go interplanetary, if we’re going to find all the cures that we need to find,” he said. unilad.com, 13 Mar 2024.