I just stumbled on a followup to this story, the guy is getting some treatment:

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/0...nary_enco.html

A different guy with the same (or a similar) condition, referenced here.

Very carefully!!!!!


Also, I'm guessing that there's not much in the way of masturbation going on...:headshake

There was an article about this man (I think it's the same man) on Foxnews recently (www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,812103,0.html). The good news is , there may be a treatment. I hope so.

Never fails to amaze me just how spectacularly wrong the human body can go. The tiniest flaw at the smallest level and boom....your life's marked in bold and underlined.

Jackalope bunny feels his pain.

What amazes me is that it is just a regular wart virus finding someone whose immune system is vulnerable to it.

:checks anti-virus software:

It also seems odd that it attacks the extremities - hands, feet, and head. Anyone care to guess why?

I don't know, but a lot of different skin conditions do that, especially if you add in the groin area.

As a scientist, if I had to take a wild and completely uneducated guess based purely on guesswork backed up by some college?

The body, as I'm sure everyone knows this much at least, grows in stages.

You start with a single cell; which starts its rapid dividing. If it avoids an overdose of Plan B, it eventually develops into a blastocyst and then gastrualizes (? too uncoffeed to check my own spelling). So, then what we have is the beginning of differentiation as the cells begin to move about to where they're going to end up in the finalized organism. Not quite 'stem cells' but not quite "Cell #228347 in the ring finger of the right hand".

So you have a circle, a dented in circle, a neural crest starts, etc, and you have a head, a 'body' and a 'tail' .. then arms and legs start to develop, then fingers and toes (and dare I say genitals). Now if this is some sort of pappilomavirus transmitted from mother to son, as was the one thought, he was infected in vivo, I guess.. autosomal, again, the same issue. So the hands/feet/etc are the 'least differentiated' cells of our bodies timewise-line, even though with people, we can't cut off an arm and have it grow back (though with some lizards and the like, it can, as the cells can defifferentiate again and grow a new limb, though I suspect if you cut out a non-vital section of their torso (Say chest muscle), the same effect would not occur).

(takes a big breath) SO that's one reason.

Also this is a keratinized disorder - keratin and keratinized cells hang out in the skin, but most keratin production is likely highly concentrated in hands and feet where the body makes fingernails and toenails. Let's just be happy this doesn't seem to spread randomly to hair follicles (at least not ones far beyond the hands and feet), or worse than just looking ugly, this poor guy would be dead.

So.. no wonder he was whisked off in an ambulance. Some labs would kill for that kind of a phenomenon to study.

Interesting...
I'm not certain about this guy but the Indonesian "Tree-Man" guy we also had recently was definitely adult-onset, having an infected cut while working.
I was thinking more in terms of less blood-flow to the extremities and more skin/volume ratio, meaning fewer white blood cells to fight more bugs.
The keratin point is a good one; especially if we include facial hair.
Hmmmmm....

Oh my, I didn't know jackalopes were real.

I feel sorry for the guy but does anyone know how I can give that condition to another person or people? Specifically my in-laws.

Morie
www.anthology.page.tl

Damn you SDRTG! I didn't need to see that again. Of course that didn't stop me from bumping it for the rest of you.

OMG jackalopes are real.

Just noticed a description of "My Shocking Story" on TLC tonight - 7 PM Central - that says "An Indonesian of a remote village has incredible rootlike growths on his body." Sounds like this guy, doesn't it?