1. African eye worms.
Botflies ain’t nothin’.Think of an eye worm as a maggot, stretched out real thin and wiggling inside your eye!! On second thought, think of something else.”
2. Naegleria Fowleri.
“Naegleria Fowleri….It’s an extremely rare bacteria that crawls up your nose and eats your brain. Fatality rate is 99%. You die in a week….”
3. Krokodil.
“There is a drug called krokodil (pronounced crock-o-deel) that literally melts your skin off but it is so highly addictive that you have to keep using it. So people who have used it have exposed bones and just keep using it anyway. That’s a level of addiction that is terrifying.”
4. Prion diseases.
“Prion diseases. A protein that is folded in a funny way gets into your brain. It convinces other proteins in your brain to fold in that funny way, too. Eventually, they all do and you die. Mad cow disease, kuru, a disease where you literally can’t sleep anymore until you go nuts and die– all prion diseases.
Animals get them, and they die in the woods. The misfolded proteins from their decaying bodies get into scavengers or just lie dormant in plants or soil until the next animal — or person—touches them, and then off we go again. Chronic Wasting Disease, a prion disease affecting deer, is endemic in the US and starting to spread internationally. The only cure is to burn the forest down.”
