Four reasons you should think twice before swimming

Few people can say they’ve never swam in a pond, lake, canal or river. Children, in particular, love this kind of entertainment and nobody can blame them. Everywhere there is a lake, pond or little river, local children gather to have a little bit of harmless fun. We all know the risk of drowning is equal to the risk of playing on the side of the road and getting hit by a car, people sometimes are not careful enough. But no matter how much we supervise children there are still things out there that you cannot stop no matter what you do. It doesn’t matter if you have your parent’s supervision or you are parents now and you are watching out for your own children, the question remains the same: Do you actually know the risks? Nowadays we stumbled upon the fact that drowning may not be your biggest concern and not because there are monsters in these waters that will grab your kid by his foot and devour him. The actual monsters aren’t big at all, you can barely see them looking through a microscope. But how can we stop something we cannot see with our naked eye? Should we carry a microscope in our bags at all times and test the water?

 Specialists may not have the answer to this question but they can tell you what you should be afraid of and what to avoid. Apparently still water is the perfect place for parasites, and if you stop and think about it for a second, it’s pretty logical too. Lakes have still water, which means no major movement will disturb its fauna, which makes it a perfect breeding place for parasites and other creepy little creatures that crawl up your every orifice. But parasites aren’t only in still water. Here are some of the potential inhabitants of your body which you can contact trough water :

1. Parasitic Roundworm Ascarisis Lumbricoides

   But you can call him Lumbri, since he will be spending his childhood in your intestines. Your new friend will cause you the disease known as Ascariasis. Research says that as many as one quarter of the world population are infected so better go check as quick as possible because Lumbri’s not alone and his friends aren’t nice.
After the parasitic eggs enter the digestive system either by swallowing infected water or food, they hatch and begin spreading. They start burrowing trough the gut wall and travel to the lungs using blood vessels. When they get to the lungs they are coughed and swallowed again, reentering the digestive system when they mature into adult worms. But that’s not the whole story; while they are taking a trip through your body they damage your organs producing peritonitis, the enlargement of your liver and spleen, verminous pneumonitis. The ones in the intestine may cause malabsorbtion and anorexia.
Doctors can’t really diagnose it unless one of the worms is passed in vomit or stool. So apart from being incredibly gross they are also dangerous. Lucky these cuties are mostly found in Africa or Latin America so unless you live there you can think of something else that cause your cramps this morning. If you those actually live in those regions stay out of canals, wash your hands 20 times a day and don’t eat anything that has fallen on the floor because if you do there will be worms coming out your nose!

2. Naegleria Fowelri 

..or as some might call it The Brain Eating Amoeba. This one is exclusively found in lakes, ponds, hot springs, unclorhidrated swimming pools and even in the soil near lakes. In fact they can be found in any type of water except salty water.
So how do they get to the brain? Well Lumbri’s system was indeed a good one but The Brain Eating Amoeba has a different plan. This parasite enters your brain through the nose, specifically the olfactory mucosa (when it infiltrates it produces necrosis and bleeding in the olfactory bulbs). After that, it climbs along your nerve fibers until it gets into the brain where it starts chewing your brain cells.
The problem with this one is that, in most cases it kills you, and it has no time to lose, you’re dead in less than two weeks, and diagnosing it is tricky because the first symptoms, such as changes in smell, nausea, vomiting, fever, headache, are usually mistaken with the flu or doctors connect them to other diseases.

After three to seven days since the first symptoms have appeared, things get out of control and now the patient has hallucinations, lack of attention, ataxia and even seizures. After seven more days the patient is most likely to decease. Once contacted there is no turning back, 98% of the cases having a tragic ending.
Unfortunately this one has no preference of region and it is possible that you find in any warm place that contains water and is not properly sanitized. I guess overly protective mothers aren’t so crazy after all by wanting to keep their child away from brain eating amoebas.

3. Dracunculus Medinensis known as The Guinea Worm

    This parasite lives in stagnant water and you get to have him by drinking infected water. The name Dracunculiasis in Latin means “affliction with little dragons”. The illness was called The Guinea Worm disease because it was first seen by the Europeans on the Guinea coast of West Africa.
        This worm is really thin and long, the adult female measuring 2-3 feet. The worm forms nodules under the mammal skin in the shape of painful blisters. The female forms a blister after one year since it was ingested. Usually the blisters are situated on the lower limbs. Obviously, it’s not deadly and all you have to do to get it out is to submerse the affected area in a bucket of water to reduce the eggs and therefor the infection, also relieving some of the burning sensation. After that you wrap the worm on a stick and pull. This is the painful part because pulling the worm causes a burning, extremely painful sensation and it might take a couple of hours or a couple of months to extract it from the body. Another way to get rid of it is to have surgery, and by all means that seems to me the best alternative. The wound may develop a second infection such as tetanus which might be life threatening though.

4. Schistosoma

Schistosoma produces Schistosomiasis. Affected individuals release parasite eggs intro the environment. These eggs hatch when they contact fresh water and after that affecting the freshwater snails.
The parasite enters the snail’s foot where it form, close to that place the main sporocyst(a protective case or cyst in which sporozoites develop and from, until they are transferred to different hosts). Germ cells that form the first sporocyst divide, producing secondary sporocysts which migrate to the snail’s hepatopancreas. After dividing in the second sporocyst, the germ cells become larvae capable of affecting mammals.
The larvae enters trough the mammal skin remaining there for two days until it locates a post capillary venule. It travels to the lungs to suffer the changes it needs to migrate to the liver. The Schistosoma parasites (S. mansoni and S. japonicum) develop an oral sucker after arriving into the liver and begin feeding on red blood cells. The nearly mature worms pair and then relocate to the mesenteric or rectal veins. Adult worms are about 10 mm long. After reaching maturity schistosomas produce nearly 3.000 eggs a day that travel through the walls of the veins and the intestinal wall being eliminated in feces and continuing the cycle.
The disease has a low mortality rate, but it’s a chronic illness that can damage organs. It is most common in the regions where, of course, the water contains many freshwater snails like South America, Asia and Africa.
At first, there are no signs of infection, but after a few days the patient may develop a rash or itchy skin. After one or two months of infection, symptoms may develop, including fever, chills, cough, and muscle aches. Without treatment it can persist for years and the signs of chronic Schistosomiasis include abdominal pain, enlarged liver, blood in the stool or blood in the urine, and problems passing urine. Chronic infection can also lead to increased risk of bladder cancer.
 Well, who thought snails could be dangerous being so slow and all…

These are some of the parasites that can be found in water, there are many more but I tried to point out the ones that were the most disgusting.  Parasites can be contacted either directly, like the first three I presented;
either by having an intermediary agent such as the snail in the 4th example, or the pig, an intermediary agent for Thenia.
It is very important that people understand the risks of contacting a parasite and learning where they are and how to recognize the symptoms may help them avoid particular places or seek medical care when they recognize the symptoms
 

The story of Abby and Brittany Hensel, a medical mistery

Abby and Brittany were born a little bit different than us. The story about the two girls held together for life by flesh isn't a new one. Born as conjoined twins, they shared one body. This is a very rare phenomenon and the chanches of surviving the first 24 hour of their lives were 1 in 30 milion. But sometimes nature decides to give us a surprise and the twins did indeed survive not only the first 24 hour of their lives but a full childhood and adolescence.

There were many articles about Abbigalil and Brittany in their early childhood. They parents were very protectie so few pictures were taken and little was known about the natural improbability that actually happened. After a more or less normal infancy the girls were ready to show their story to the world. A documentary was made and after that they had their very own reality show named "Joined for life", and joined for life indeed they were, but the question we will probabily never have an answer to is how? 

How can these girls be what they are today? These are the questions many phisicians have posed since Abby and Brit were born. Parents didn't want us to know or to understand how,so we can only speculate on the complex anatomy that glued these two people together into one conjoined life. 

In the picture you can see that their unique body has two hearts and two sets of lungs in one rib cage. The cariovascular system of their body is astoneshing. There is no mammal on this planet that has something like that. How do their hearts work? Do they have one aorta that splits to both hearts, do they have two that fuse at some point? Are the limbs and the heads irigated by the heart on their side or do the hearts work together? What happens if one heart stops? Not only we do not know the answers of these questions but more importantly we cannot understand if they are two or one.

One of the most interesting things about their individuality is that each girl controls the arm and leg on her side of the body and they cannot feel the other's side. Despite these aspects the twins can synchronize their movements extremely well and they developed a complex psychological bond that allows them to finish each other's sentences. While writing an e-mail with both hands there is little comunication between the girls. Brittany admits "While we're YM-ing or writing e-mails we normally say -I am- not -we are-, I don't know why". Scientists all over the world are eager to determine through brain and nervous sistem imaging techniques their sense of space and movement, how do they react to the other's gestures. These things are now possible with brain scans that detect subtle alterations in the blood flow or in the brain metabolism but the parents and the girls don't want their lives to be anything than normal. 

But what actually is normal with these girls? Doctors say these special nervous connections that allow them to be so in sync with each other have occured very early after conception. The nervous system will have been developing only a few weeks later and this specific one involved connections that don't normally occur in normal people. You can't have motor fibers going down one spine and up the other, at least we shouldn't be able to. Each normal brain has two hemispheres, a right one and a left one and each hepisphere controls the opposite side of the body. These girls have only one body and normally four hemispheres so how does that work? Being a huge fan of speculation myself, I would say that even if they cannot feel the others touch, there are more complex spacial maps in their brains that allow them to know where the other limb is situated. 

I think that some of you may be familiar with the term Phantom Limb syndrome. The Phantom Limb sindrome is the sensation 60 to 80 % of amputee pacients feel after having one limb removed. The sensation is often as if the missing limb is still there and it may cause severe frustration to the individual and pain where the leg should have been. First scientists tought that the pain was caused by the nerve endings that were severed in the surgery and were sending signals that the brain interpreted as pain. Surgeons usually operated again to cut and remove the severed inflamated nerve endings but it only made it worse.

Ronald Melzack wrote that the experience of the body is made by a wide network of interconnecting neural structures. Tim Pons and his coleagues from the National Institute of Health showed that the primary somatosensory cortex undergoes massive reorganisation after loss of sensory imput. To make it simpler, the wires get mixed up in your head and the brain doesn't know which are which so you feel strokes that are on other parts of your body on your missing limb like it's still there.

I told you that part to help you uderstand my speculation. Even if their brains are wired differently than ours, the major rules that make us work still apply to them. So if the somatosensory cortex is in charge with all the information nerves send from the body to the brain, after Abby and Brittany were conceived and the nervous system started to form, each of their brains adapted to only one side but each somatosensory cortex (situated in the postcentral gyrus of each brain) received imput from both sides therefore giving the girls the possibility of having almost the coorination of a normal human being.

We also have to understand that they have grown up together and although they had two heads, they did the work of one human. Even if each mind can think for itself they were constructed to also think for each other. Indeed their individuality was affected but their quality of life is much greater by not separating them. We will always wonder how can they be the way they are and we can always speculate but maybe one day this medical mistery will be solved and we will understand how they ca be at the same time two people and one.

Thenk you for reading. The information for this post was taken form Wikipedia and the documentary "The Twins who Share a Body-My shocking story"

Van Gogh painting has cocaigne in it

The Beginning Of Procrastination (a short history)

Procrastination - The practice of carrying out less urgent tasks in preference to more urgent ones, or doing more pleasurable things in place of less pleasurable ones, and thus putting off impending tasks to a later time. According to Freud, the pleasure principle may be responsible for procrastination; humans prefer to avoid negative emotions, and to delay stressful tasks. The belief that humans work best under pressure provides an additional incentive to postponement of tasks. Some psychologists cite such behavior as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision. Other psychologists indicate that anxiety is just as likely to get people to start working early as late and the focus should be impulsiveness. That is, anxiety will cause people to delay only if they are impulsive.

Our brains are supposed to be super computers but nobody tells us how easily our brains can be hacked. The difference between a super computer and our brains (one of them) is that our brains can not only be hacked by others but by themselves. If you tell a computer to perform a task, the computer will obey your command and perform the algoritm. They go all 010001001001010001010100 on their ass and get to work, so why can't we?

Well the answer is at the begining of the post. And it is not a very recent issue as you can see, it existed before technology coud be blamed for the number of distractions it offers to our brain.

I chose to write about procrastination because at the moment I am actually procrastinating by writing about procrastination and I tought that this is a beautiful example and opportunity. I hate procrastination but I also love the amount of information I stuff into my head when last minute panic kicks in. So why do our brains function well when afraid and why we can't get them started when we need them to. It's not like by being afraid of an exam or our boss threatenes our life, right?

Wrong! And not because there any real danger but because your brain is very very very old. Well not actually your brain, don't take me so literaly, the DNA that makes your brain what it is today. So why is that a problem, it's not like it's outdated just like your Iphone 5 gets when Iphone 5s comes in with that fancy fingerprint technology? Well it's exactly like that. When we were CAVE MEN, not that long go (you may think it was because people tend to picture cave men running a

long with dinosaurs, but actually dinosaurs were extinct 65 milion years before the human race even emerged) our brains strived to keep us alive before we could call ourselves modern in any way. Actually humans, anatomically modern humans appeared in Africa, 200.000 years ago and reached behavioral modernity about 50.000 years ago. It took them 150.000 years to learn how to start a fire and make the wheel we all know and love.

At that time they were fighting all sorts of creatures and their instincts had to be very sharp to survive, they had to know when to run from danger and when to stay and fight. Most of the time they ran and starved a while but better alive and a little hungry than dead under a mammoth foot. So Man went on hunting and feeding himself and his family for generations and generations to follow. When  finally evolved enough to speak we could insult, annoy but most important, kill one another knowingly. I will not continue to bore you with the affairs of my great great great x 10000 grandfather but I will tell you that the human brain did it's best a huge amount of time to keep us from being killed. Most of the things we did involved killing or being killed so yes, our brains actually are outdated. The problem is that it took our brains 200.000 years to learn how to keep us out of danger but only in the last 500 years or so the risk of getting killed wherever you went slowly dissapeared and today the things that scare us are the deadlines we always have, the need to do the things that require work and really really don't like work.

   There was one bright fellow that said:

'We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.'   The bright fellow was Chuck Palahniuk and I guess you've seen Fight Club, the cinematic adaptation of his book where this quote is from.

So let us put the pieces together. Our entire race has been on a killing spree for most of its existence, recently we've gone sober and there's no war, no plague, no Great Depression in our lifes so our brain has no mortal danger to be afraid of and our day by day concerns have become the things we are most afraid of. And what did our brain do when we were afraid of something? He usually made you anxious (it got all your senses sharpened and worked hard to somehow keep you alive) to give you the best chance of surviving that he could. 

But your body cannot do that all the time because it exhausts it and the vicious cyrcle is formed. Your brain knows you are afaid of your deadline and you always wait untill last minute panic kicks in. That is the moment he thinks you are going to die because you are making him push his limits (being outdated, your brain doesn't know that pushing limits nowadays doesn't mean your teacher will pull out a shotgun and put 5 holes in your chest if you don't take the test). He does what you ask but know the connection is made, whenever you need to learn or write a paper you will hate it because you will be thinking about the deadline and that for you is death. So now when your parents ask you why you didn't stydy and got that bad mark tell them it's your ancestor's fault.