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Nature is out to kill you: Sun (and friends) edition

I’m sure you’ve heard of sunburns. The sun, while totally necessary for sustaining life on this planet, can also be a big jerk sometimes. It casts out UV rays that damage, among other things, your skin. A sunburn can result in reddened skin, fatigue, itching, and soreness in mild cases. A severe case might involve blisters, fever, nausea, pain, and even fainting. And of course there’s the wonderful sloughing off of dead skin as you heal. That’s always very attractive.

Now, that’s caused just by the sun. And you easily can prevent sunburn by wearing protective clothing or applying sunscreen (with regularity). But did you know that the sun can still burn you even when you take care to protect yourself from it? It can. Because the sun has pals.

Photodermatitis. Photodermatitis is your skin’s allergic reaction to a substance that is only evinced when exposed to sunlight. That’s right, you can be totally fine while you’re in the house, but then you spend some time in the sun and then BAM! You’ve got symptoms of sunburn. Plus, affected areas tend to turn an orangey-brown color. And of course, you’re not affected evenly across your skin. You’ll probably have these weird orange blotches over your exposed skin. It’s very attractive.

Now, you can actually avoid photodermatitis by covering your skin from sun exposure, but sunscreen obviously doesn’t work. Actually, certain sunscreens can cause photodermatitis. PABA, an ingredient in some sunscreens, has been shown to cause photodermatitis in some people. Also, NSAIDs, very common painkillers, have been shown to do the same thing. Think of how common it is to take some Ibuprofen for joint pain or a headache. Maybe that was keeping you inside. But now that you’re pain free, you’re ready to go outside for a run or do some gardening, and then BAM! You find yourself developing orange splots over your skin.

Phytophotodermatitis. Speaking of gardening, what if you were out in your garden and for some reason you found some wild carrots or wild parsnips growing? What if you decided to pull them out with your bare hands? What if you were wearing a tee shirt and shorts and sandals because it was hot? What if you found yourself with weird sunburn-like symptoms a day or two later even if you hadn’t been in the sun since gardening? Welp, that’s phytophotodermatitis. Photodermatitis, but caused by plants.

Certain plants, like wild parsnips, have chemicals (furocoumarins) in the leaves that react with the sun causing a skin reaction. Said plants are actually very common in places like Wisconsin. Said plants with said chemicals react to UV radiation, so you may think you’re ok on an overcast day when you go out on a hike in shorts, but you are not. Because while here is less visible light from the sun due to cloud cover, UV rays are still present in abundance. You won’t know that you have been affected right away either, because it takes a day or so before symptoms occur. Isn’t that fun? Oh, and don’t forget that wild parsnips look pretty innocuous. Not like poison ivy (which does not cause phytophotodermatitis).

Now, none of these things would kill a normal, healthy person. But it would make a normal, healthy person pretty uncomfortable due to the actual physical symptoms and the social outcastism. I mean, who wants to go out in public when they’re in full molt? Or how about if you have a blister the size of a grapefruit on your leg? It’s pretty unlikely you’d be able to cover that up. Even if you could, your pants, or whatever, would hang pretty weirdly over this grapefruit sized bump on your leg and still be pretty noticeable. And what if that blister is on the inside of your leg? You’d have to walk all bowlegged because you’d want to avoid popping the blister (I pop my blisters all the time though because I think they’re really annoying).

But say you popped your blister and then it got infected. And you didn’t take care of it because you didn’t think much of a sunburn or sunburn-like symptoms. And then you got gangrene. But you didn’t know what gangrene was. So you didn’t take care of it. And then you died because gangrene is fatal if you don’t do anything about it. Because think about it, a large part of your body has died but is still connected to your still living body. I somehow don’t think you’re going to survive a battle against your own dead body.

So, nature is out to kill you.

Nature is out to kill you: Acanthamoeba edition

I hadn’t originally intended this to be a series of posts, but…there are things out in nature trying to kill you and you should know about them. Or really, I just like these horror stories. Although being brained by a tree isn’t so much a horror story as it is an event of extreme misfortune. ANYWAY…

Have you heard of the acanthamoeba? It’s an amoeba (duh) found in soil and fresh water. It’s the fresh water that’s the thing. It’s also found in tap water. And most buildings in the US are hooked into the municipal water supply. So it can get to you.

Why is this a problem, you ask? Well, under normal circumstances it isn’t a problem. The acanthamoeba normally eats bacteria or other protozoa. But there a few, the dastardly few, that can infect humans and infect them in increasingly horrid ways.

The first way, and the way I first found out about the amoeba (via reading weird news and not from personal experience), is that the acanthamoeba can live on your contact lenses if you don’t clean them well. This is a problem because if you stick said contact lens in your eye, the amoeba starts eating your cornea. Apparently, 75 people get to experience this each year in the UK. A teenager in Florida recently experienced the sensation of her cornea being eaten.

What happens when the amoeba starts eating your eye? Well, you go to the doctor where you are most likely misdiagnosed. It’s not really your doctor’s fault in misdiagnosing you. Seventy-five people may sound like a lot of people, but when you consider that there are millions of contacts wearers, 75 is a pretty small number in comparison. There are lots of other things that can happen to your eye to make it red and throbby and swollen. Things that are a lot more common than a parasite eating your eye.

Anyhoo, when your doctor finally figures out what’s happening to your eye, you begin treatment that involves a hospital stay and disinfecting eyedrops. If your doctor didn’t figure it out soon enough, you go blind. Tada! So fun! Clean your contacts properly, you. And wash your hands with soap beforehand. Or wear daily disposables. Or attempt to attain laser heat vision. Those methods would also work. (But still wash your hands regularly.)

Admittedly, going blind because a parasite has eaten your eye is unfortunate and unpleasant, but it’s not really fatal. And the title of this post blatantly advertises that nature is trying to kill you. So what else can this amoeba do? Well, it can cause encephalitis. If you are so lucky as to inhale some of its airborne cysts or get a cut in which the parasite can gain entry into your body, it will find its way into your central nervous system. Then it can cross the blood-brain barrier and wreak massive havoc upon your brain, and not just your attention span. As you know, the brain is an organ that is fairly vital to one’s continued living status. Survival rate is pretty slim. About 2-3%. And once again, misdiagnosis is common as the symptoms of infection are very similar to other more common causes. Yay!

If it makes you feel better, this infection normally only occurs in people who are already ill or have some kind of impaired immune system.

OTHER THINGS THIS AMOEBA CAN DO! It can be a host for MRSA. And then MRSA can replicate in it. MRSA stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or sometimes multi-drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus. That’s about as bad as it sounds.

MRSA is prevalent in hospitals. I blame the overuse of antibiotics (I’m ok with alcohol-based sanitizers). A MRSA infection in a hospital tends to be pretty bad stuff. Actually, an infection of normal, not drug-resistant staph in a hospital is pretty bad stuff. That’s because a good amount of those infections are occurring when you’re getting surgery or related and not a surface infection. You get an infection that’s deep inside of you, like inside your bone obtained from say, a car accident in which you broke your ankle (no, this didn’t happen to me but to someone I know), where it’s hard for antibiotics to get to and work effectively.

Now imagine that it’s not just a normal staph infection in your bone, but a MRSA infection. And now imagine that acanthamoeba busses are carrying even more MRSA and even delivering it to your brain. You’re probably going to liquefy and melt from the inside out. Your brains might dribble out of your ears and nose! Huzzah!

Not only that, acanthamoeba supposedly helps increase the MRSA population. Nature is trying to kill you!

Disclaimer: Most of my information came from Wikipedia and I haven’t done any research with primary or secondary resources (although I totally should as this stuff sounds really interesting). And also, this is a blog and not even a science blog. So…just take that as you will.