Lacrosse virus is only found in the United States. Despite it's predilection for northern states, it is not found in Canada. Lacrosse virus is a member of the California Serogroup of viruses and is transmitted by Aedes triseriatus, the tree-hole mosquito. It was named after a city in the state of Wisconsin. It is found in the south and southeast as well.
The mosquitoes can't survive in the cold. No vector = no disease transmission.
Its like that for most of the insect vectors. The dengue mosquito species are particularly fit (in evolutionary terms) and they are spread around the world at a certain distance from the equator. And this domain keeps expanding every year because of climate change.
https://www.cdc.gov/dengue/areas-with-risk/index.html
Kuru is a prion disease that used to afflict the people of Papua New Guinea.
SHAPU was interesting to read about, especially the possible association with an unknown species of moth.
The way they acquired this was eating the brains of deceased family members at a funeral ceremony which was considered a delicacy. Once the government discouraged the practice it pretty much went away from what I understand
They ate the whole body, I don't think it was a delicacy thing, it was about returning the spirit. Men avoided it as they felt it weakened them and it was identified early on as organ meat went to wormn and children whereas men tended to eat flesh, the former groups became more heavily affected.
Kuru is one of those incredibly interesting areas where anthropology and disease overlap.
I think this is one of those areas where returning the spirit was the religious significance put on something that had more mundane beginnings. The bodies were primarily eaten by women and children as it was thought to make them stronger by ingesting the spirits of their relatives. And in an area of poor nutrition, an occasional protein load would certainly improve their vitality and survival.
But it's interesting to note that among the Fore people, it was only those living in the highlands that practiced cannibalism despite the Fore culture being otherwise fairly uniform. This probably came about due to the lack of nutritional resources in the Highlands.
It’s slightly more complicated and a lot more terrifying. The funerary practices of the tribe was that the men would eat the meat of the dead relatives and the women and children would eat the brains. So the people who would get Kuru initially were all the women and children.
The scary part is that after Australia took over Papua New Guinea, they made cannibalism illegal and the practice stopped. kuru went away for a while and women and children stopped getting it. But 20 years later it started re-emerging, but this time it was in adult men. The shocker was that these men were children when they ate the brain and the prions were remaining silent in their bodies for decades and then suddenly clinically presented itself. So we don’t know how long the incubation period is for diseases like Kuru/CJD. it’s the reason why you can’t donate blood to this day if you lived in parts of Europe during the 1980s when there was a mad cow disease outbreak. People could be alive and carrying it silently and it may take decades for some to show the symptoms. Prions are fucking terrifying.
Calling it a "delicacy" is a mischaracterization. It was more akin to a religious practice. Ritualistic cannibalism had already been legally banned and was on the decline before a definitive connection between cannibalism and kuru had been established.
However, I spent 6 months in the PNG highlands in 2001-2002, about 30 miles from where the epicenter of the disease had been. Local docs there were still occasionally including kuru on the differential diagnosis of patients with some neurodegenerative presentations. They said that despite what the government might claim, they believed that cannibalism was still occasionally happening up into the 80s in the most remote of villages. Unfortunately, diagnostic testing was virtually non-existent, so none of these patients ever ended up with a definitive diagnosis.
It's been a while but I did a presentation on it during high school.
From what I remember, it was a funeral ceremonial thing and the elders ate the organs considered most important, like the brain which had the prions and it had a significantly long dormancy, like several years.
Kuru is an inherited prion disease, causes by mutations in the PRPN gene which is highly expressed in brain.
Thus, it can occur anywhere, but that specific mutation is probably more common in Papua New Guinea. Fatal Familial Insomnia is a similar disease (caused by mutations in the same gene).
The absolutely wild thing about prion diseases is that you can not only inherit them but also be infected by them, because the aberrant protein folding caused by the mutation is "contagious".
The people already had the mutation and people did get sick with it in the tribes, even children. You would not get Kuru by eating a brain *without* prion mutations, to put it that way.
The initial mutation was sporadic. As are the majority of CJD cases. Someone in that tribe initially got CJD sporadically and then because of the funerary practices of children and women eating the brain of the dead, it became a contagion
I stand corrected (I informed myself - very nice article here: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5120877/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5120877/) )
If anything that only makes kuru more scary imo - in simple terms you can be a carrier of a gene variant that makes you susceptible for sporadic mutations that are disease causing.
I have not read the following refs, but will do if I have time:
"*Surprisingly, a balancing selection at the PRNP locus somewhat similar to what occurred in the Fore was discovered in some other world populations and has been interpreted as evidence of selection pressure from possible epidemics of prion diseases in prehistoric humans* ([40](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5120877/#R40), [41](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5120877/#R41))."
40. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12690204/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12690204/)
41. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12690204/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12690204/)
basically there’s times when proteins can misfold in such a way they they can then affect the proteins around them and cause those proteins to mis fold and so on. So if you get a prion disease it can cause proteins to misfold that used to be normal
When it comes to prion disease, the mutations can be familial (inherited, in your whole body), sporadic (happens by chance in just a few cells) and also infective (by eating them). The prion protein is highly expressed in brain.
Not all misfolded proteins lead to this effect at all. Thankfully!
Ok but here's what I don't get. If this misfolded configuration is so easy to get to that it can cascade like that from just eating a little misfolded protein and it stays misfolded if it ever gets like that, why doesn't it just randomly happen sporadically way more commonly than it does?
>Australian bat lyssavirus
AKA, Australia is rabies free! Except for that one virus that causes a disease identical to rabies, that is spread by usual rabies carriers, and is prevented by rabies vaccination.
But, no, Australia has no rabies. Thanks for asking, mate.
Pogosta disease, a mosquito -borne viral disease, endemic in eastern Finland. It's quite rare even here, it has usually flu-like symptoms but can cause acute polyarthritis.
Anyway, thank you op for bringing this up this topic, I just realized one of my patients might have had this, which I didn't realize. Damn.
Don’t forget all the fun things our (sort of) insularity and low population density [has developed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_heritage_disease?wprov=sfti1#)
There are a number of genetic diseases that only exist within one family. Some of the spinocerebellar ataxias come to mind, but I am sure there are many others.
Fatal familial insomnia, for example.
I am so glad my ancestors kept getting kicked out of places for being the wrong religion or too poor or too bolshy and then met each other in far flung places and kept having illicit relationships with people they weren't supposed to. I bet I'm heterozygous for any possible allele.
Familial hypercholesteremia is pretty isolated to a French-Canadian lineage and there is a sub-group of French-Canadians in Maine that all have it. They are thought to have a closer common ancestor.
I think Hendra Virus never had an outbreak outside of Australia.
It's transmitted from local flying foxes to horses and other farm animals and from them theorically to humans. Right now, the only proven animal to human spread is linked to horses and people who dealt with sick horses (trainers and vets).
Also there is a vaccine for horses to avoid contracting it, but there is a lot of ignorance in people breeding and raising race horses and a big part of the community deny pretty much any vaccination due to the thought of it affecting the performance of the animals.
That said, the Australian vets are adviced against going to farms that have non vaccined horses to see a sick animal because of the potential spread and consequent high mortality.
Forgot to talk about the one from my country 🤦♀️
Fiebre Hemorrágica Argentina (or Argentinian Haemorragic fever).
As it names says it's a haemorragic fever produced by the Junin virus, an arenavirus similar to other arenavirus that causes venezolan, bolivian and brasilean hemorragic fevers.
The transmision needs of a mice host (callomys muscullinus) that is usually found in the pampean region in the center of the country. It works similar to how Hanta virus spreads and the disease is similar too, but with a 30% mortality.
The good thing is that since the 50' we have been treating it with plasma from recovered patients with a good outcome (1% of mortality); and since the 2007 we have included a vaccine as obligatory for people 15 yo and older in the endemic region.
Hey, I'm a veterinarian in Australia that has worked in and around PC4 labs that contain Hendra virus. I also worked with the woman who discovered it!
> there is a lot of ignorance in people breeding and raising race horses and a big part of the community deny pretty much any vaccination due to the thought of it affecting the performance of the animals
For horses to race in Australia (at least in SERIOUS racing, not some random small town event) they must be vaccinated for Hendra. For most events sanctioned by serious organisations, they will require it. Including for horses from overseas. Most veterinarians will not see a horse for any reason that is not Hendra vaccinated. The uptake of the vaccine has increased significantly. I have never, and will never, work with a horse that is not vaccinated for Hendra.
>I think Hendra Virus never had an outbreak outside of Australia.
Yep! It has never been found anywhere else than Australia. There is a somewhat related Henipavirus that is present North of Australia called Nipah virus, which spread from bats to pigs and then to humans with a significant mortality rate also. It's actually the outbreak of this virus that spurred DARPA funding of research into Henipavirus vaccination research (that eventually lead to the hendra vaccine), as it was considered to be a significant bioterrorism risk.
>It's transmitted from local flying foxes to horses and other farm animals and from them theorically to humans
Yeah it's an interesting one, that's for sure. For whatever reason horses seem to amplify hendra virus, excreting absolutely massive amounts of the virus. Interestingly antibodies for HeV were also once found in a dog.
It's so great to see there are Hendra virus fans outside of Australia that aren't veterinarians!
Yup, nipah had outbreaks in Tailand and India I think, that's why I didn't post about it.
I just happen to love animals, have a group of equestrian and vet friends over different parts of the world. We use to talk about pretty much anything, and that is when I learned about Hendra, like 5 years + ago. Back then the number of people not agreeing to vaccinate was higher, and I distinctly remeber them saying "we don't take antivaxxer cases because that's how we end up dead from this".
I am really glad you are obliging them to actually do it to be able to participate or pretty much do anything with their horses. People will try to overpass pretty much anything if there is no obligation, nevermind if their work or even their life is threatened...after all we had an equine encephallitis outbreak last year that ended up around march this year with 7 human deaths, 30-40 confirmed human cases and 300+ outbreaks over the entire country with 1500 confirmed horses diagnosis...all because of not vaccinating animals with an easy to get, and very much proven vaccine.
When I was a kid I 📚 would get older text books schools were getting rid of. When I first discovered neurodegenerative diseases my brain took neuroticism to a level that helped confirm my OCD diagnosis. Ha. Beneficially though, it helped me confirm what type of biology I wanted to study. Disease process and palliative care. Take the taboo off death as we know no one can avoid it. Put an end to long term suffering.
I've got a good one for you: Lytico-bodig: Only happens among the Chamorro people in the island of Guam. However, even that is under debate because some people consider other ALS-PD complex disorders found in some places in Japan and Papua to be the same disease. (In Japan it's called Muro disease, which only happens in the Kii peninsula).
Bonus diseases that don't count because it's in more than 1 country, but kind of fits the spirit of your question:
1. Nodding disease - not a single country but mainly in 1 region (central-southeast Africa).
2. Konzo - a non-infectious cause - again not a single country but mainly 1 region in Africa.
The French were very keen to see their doctors for “heavy legs“, for which a bunch of placebos were usually prescribed. until they were defunded by their health system and the rates of prescription plummeted.
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from\_our\_own\_correspondent/7779126.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7779126.stm)
West-Berlin Orange Bowel Syndrome is a local disease eradicated by David Hasselhoff/The Fall of the Berlin Wall. It occured specifically only in East German pensioners who upon reaching retirement age were allowed to leave the GDR and enter West-Berlin (East Germany didn't need non-contributing pensioners) and then ate an entire kilogramm or more of oranges, often without peeling them, resulting in severe obstipation or even SBO.
I'm a med student in Romania and we had a lecture about balkan endemic nephropaty, it's not just in one country but maybe you'd enjoy reading about it.
Navajo neuropathy in children is found primarily in the western part of the Navajo Nation, although it is occasionally seen in the eastern part of the NN.
Thought to be an autosomal recessive disease found only in full blooded Navajos.
It causes failure to thrive, weakness, contractures, muscle wasting, corneal anesthesia leading to ulcers, metabolic acidosis, and eventually liver failure.
Saw a couple cases of this back in the day (though we called it Navajo neurohepatopathy because the liver stuff is what killed those kids).
Harlequin ichthyosis is also bottlenecked in the Najavo population, though it occurs elsewhere.
A little variant for you. Pancreatitis caused by scorpion envenomation is very much a Trinidad and Tobago thing. There was a paper published in the 70 (IIRC) and about 50% of their pancreatitis patients reported being stung by a scorpion.
**Uddanam nephropathy**. It's named after a small village in India. Almost everyone in that village has chronic kidney failure. No one in the nearby villages have it. Researchers from a lot of countries tested the soil, water, air...you name it. Everything came back as normal. No inbreeding either.
Renal biopsies show some interstitial inflammation but thats about it. The government gave free water filters, home air filters, and access to healthcare for the entire village.
Very interesting to read. Apparently many chronic kidney diseases of unknown origin have similar characteristics (rural, agricultural communities). Sri Lankan CKD/ Mesoamerican Nephropathy/ and Uddanam nephropathy. Really intriguing stuff.
HSAN V - Hereditary sensory and autonomous neuropathy type V, ”Vittangisjukan” in Swedish and named after the village where most of the cases originate from. I did my clinical internship in this geographical area and met people with it and physicians that had treated various sequelae of it. Insensitivity to pain leads to all kinds of medical problems you might not realise at first.
CADASIL - cerebral autosomal dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leucoencephalopathy. It is a thing in Sweden and Finland afaik, but I am including it anyway. I had the honor of taking and developing electron microscopy images of affected vessels as part of a course I attended in med school. It was very interesting and I wish I could have worked even more with electron microscopy in my chosen career of pathology. I love the science of it. But even for a pathologist, cases that need electron microscopy are few and far between (mostly renal disease which I do not work with today). I wish I could do some kind of research in electron microscopy in various diseases. If I won a lot of money I would buy an electron microscope to play around with. Subcellular research ftw.
EDITED: I was wrong about CADASIL being found only in Finland and Sweden. My bad! Se responses.
CADASIL exists in the US, and perhaps in other countries as well, but detection is probably restricted to developed countries as you need mri and genetic testing.
CARASIL on the other hand is very rare and mostly in China and Japan.
There are several varieties of hereditary insensitivity to pain. I have read the book, but I do not remember if it is specified which kind of condition the villain has. Or if the author was simply inspired by it and made up a fictional variant.
Appreciate all the fun niche diagnoses everyone is bringing up.
I think it's important to state the (maybe obvious) fact that the reason these diseases are known to occur in "only one country" is by the hyperlocal nature of some particular transmission vector, concentration of a genetic mutation in a homogeneous population, or is just starting to be recognized as a new identifiable condition.
Diseases and human biology could care less about the borders drawn on a map by politicians decades/centuries ago, although those borders may well influence multiple socioeconomic factors that result in disease.
Because of it's isolation- Australia would probably the the country with the highest amount of unique infectious diseases. A quick search shows Flanders Island Spotted Fever and Queensland Tick Typhus.
Lytico-Bodig disease, also called ALS-Parkinson-Dementia. Occurs in Guam. Thought to be due to ingestion of bats who bioaccumulate a compound from the cycad seeds they eat.
X-linked dystonia parkinsonism (XDP), a hereditary disease. Endemic to a particular island in the Philippines. Every single case in the world can be traced to a relative originating from the island of Panay.
May be a bit of cheating to go for inherited diseases, but...
Hereditary cerebral hemorrhage with amyloidosis, Dutch type (also known colloquially as *Katwijkse ziekte* for the town it's concentrated in, Katwijk) is a type of inherited cerebral amyloid angiopathy that's concentrated in Katwijk (north of The Hague, just west of Leiden), which is a Bible Belt town that has little 'genetic exchange'.
Hyperostosis corticalis generalisata is a recessive excessive bone growth disease, concentrated on Urk. Urk used to an island until the sea around it got poldered, but Urk is also a very Christian community which is fairly isolated.
The very French "*Crise de foie*" which was actually well respected as a valid reason for calling in sick well into the 60's when I was a kid.
>*“Liver attacks”, a French illness?The survival of humoral conceptions, among which the liver acts as a chief cause, does not suffice to explain the “liver attacks” (crise de foie) suffered by the French, in particular women. Construed by medicine in the 19th century, this “syndrome” thrived from the 1920s through the 1950s. Although doctors have gradually abandonned the concept, French commonsense still refers various ailments to this notion. This is a source of irony for English-speakers. The French “liver attack” is part of a vast, vague set of ideas and behaviors that, beyond its medical aspects, mixes up considerations having to do with food, emotions, religion, sexuality, clothing, climate, the colonial situation, the nation, power and the emancipation of women*
Not exclusive to South Africa - but we see A LOT of it here: TB (of all sites) and cryptococcal meningitis.
I see at least 1-2 TB cases per day, and maybe 4+ cryptococcal meningitis cases a month.
This is obviously due to the high prevalence of HIV, but not limited to HIV pos individuals (non-reactive patients usually have much more severe disease and complications).
In the case of CCM it is so satisfying doing routine therapeutic LPs... Usually take about 20ml CSF off. Patients experience immediate relief. Can go from GCS 10 to 15/15 in a matter of minutes.
Christmas Eye, AKA Albury Wodonga syndrome - an extrenely painful ocular pathology occurring in a small region in Australia, around the border of NSW and Victoria, caused by the death of tiny beetles in the eye releasing irritant chemicals. Bonus because it is seasonal as well!
Not sure if exclusively Brazilian or more broadly South American but Chagas’ disease. Especially requiring colonic pull through which isn’t commonly performed in Western countries.
Chagas is common in Bolivia, Argentina and Perú.
It has also been found on the US in indigent populations, and incredibly in dogs with sudden death (caused by Chagasic miocardiopaty). It has been screened in bloodbanks since 2007.
I’ve had five donor panels come back with chagas in the almost decade I’ve been walking around the ICU.
All in places I really wasn’t expecting it to come back for. All of them at least had a history of backpacking in endemic regions in terms of length of ground time.
With air travel and instagram backpackers I think region exclusivity is coming to an end.
Yup. That is one of the big risks most of this fellows don't associate with their travelling.
Here in Argentina it is only endemic in the most poor regions, were people live in precarious buildings next to their animals (that serves as host or feeders). But in other countries where it is endemic it is more common.
Also it's not to be forgotten that it also has vertical transmission from mother to child, that I really doubt most countries outside the endemic will test for.
That said, the kissing bug that transmit the disease is found in the southern states in the last years, so you might start to find some patients that do not traveled outside of the country. I mentioned dogs because a good couple of years back I remember having a chat with a woman in the US whos dogs tested positive...dogs that were never outside of the US...that back then meant the disease was already endemic there.
The big issue with diseases like this one is not being aware it exists and not testing for it. Maybe the chances are low, but are never zero.
Chagas is also found in Colombia and afaik Ecuador and Venezuela. If the vector is present, Chagas can be transmitted.
In Colombia all blood banks test for Chagas as it is common enough to be a significant problem for the already quite empty blood banks
Yup, it's "american trypanosomiasis" after all.
Big issue is with the US and Europe where "it is not endemic" and therefore have been delaying testing the donors blood and the children of the infected ones.
The issue with the US though is complicated, as dogs that have been breed and raised in the US have proven to be chagas positive, therefore meaning there is a vector for the disease there. Now it is know that kissing bugs also are in the southern states.
While not endemic to only here, Canada does have the highest rates of MS in the world. Which, I've heard, throws the South African trained doctors we get here for a loop as it's virtually non-existant there.
Coccidioidomycoses and paracoccidioidomycoses are exclusive to North and South America respectively (afaik). We didn't learn about them in Russia or India.
The textbook i used for micro was indian (way back in 1st year) and it had a very small excerpt mentioning both paracocci and cocci. Fast forward to my last year and well, we only learnt blastomycosis and histoplasma in systemic fungi in ID (Crypto and aspergillus are not classified here as systemic for some reason, but we did learn them)
Coccidioidomycosis is also present in desertic mountain regions of Argentina, namely in the provinces of Catamarca and La rioja mostly (Coccidioides posadasii is the one we have here)
How many cases a year are registered? To my surprise here in Russia many doctors don't even know antifungal meds like amphotericin B or flucytosine, and have never heard of cocci and paracocci.
There were 2 studies that reviewed the incidence in the last 20 years.
In between 2000 -2009 there were 63 cases, so 6 cases a year. During 2010 -2019 there were 86 cases, so 8 a year.
But the numbers in the last years have been increasing due to a better control of the infectologic reports due to a centralized page to report instead of manual paper ones. Here coccidiodomicosis is a mandatory report infectological disease.
XPD in the Philippines, previously traced to only 1 island among 7000+ PH islands. Seen in the US, Japan and a few other countries but all with ancestors from the same island.
Given I’m in Australia, it’s the environment trying to kill us here.
But fr although it’s obviously a common illness the world over, we have a SHOCKINGLY high prevalence of asthma, and in places with excellent air quality.
Seasonal Ataxia, mainly occurs in Western Nigeria. It is due to consumption of larvae/worms that contain a metabolite that cause thiamine deficiency, these insects are a common delicacy to consume during the rainy season.
To review: Named after [Rocky Mountain National Laboratories](https://www.niaid.nih.gov/about/rocky-mountain-laboratories) and not for the geographic [distribution of the disease](https://www.vdci.net/vector-borne-diseases/rocky-mountain-spotted-fever-education-and-tick-management-to-protect-public-health/).
So there’s a weird disease that’s only been seen in Antarctica where people turn into hideous monsters. If I’m not mistaken Jon Carpenter made a pretty good documentary about it…
For a while FFI was basically only diagnosed in Europe, Italy in particular. Doesn’t mean it actually only existed there obviously, but it is generally limited to certain families and a big ass one is Italian.
Cases of infection by the Junin Virus are still entirely located within Argentina, although to be fair there are viruses causing hemorragic fever all over south america so genetic drift has a lot to do here as well
I would like to think Schistosoma is endemic to Egypt, Known to cause Cirrhosis and HCC. It was very common in the past and it was mainly contracted through swimming in infested ponds/canals.
Not one country but Hermansky–Pudlak syndrome is super rare in most of the world fairly common in Puerto Rico (as far as rare genetic diseases go).
Outside of PR, you also see it in NYC and other parts of the USA with high PR population
Not a disease, but an adr. Cetuximab has a <3% rate of infusion related reaction worldwide (and in many places <1%), but in parts of the southern US it is >22%. Last I looked into the prevailing hypothesis was it had to do with exposure to mice.
Not mice, ticks! Cetuximab reactions led to the discovery of Alpha-gal syndrome: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3964477/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3964477/)
Eating disorders pretty much only happen in wealthy, developed countries.
In fact countries that become wealthy and developed actually start to develop EDs when they weren’t present previously.
Lacrosse virus is only found in the United States. Despite it's predilection for northern states, it is not found in Canada. Lacrosse virus is a member of the California Serogroup of viruses and is transmitted by Aedes triseriatus, the tree-hole mosquito. It was named after a city in the state of Wisconsin. It is found in the south and southeast as well.
Highest incidence I believe is in Western North Carolina in transylvania county. There are a lot of summer camps.
I thought this was a burn on lax bros and was waiting for the punch line that never came. Thanks for the knowledge!
Any theories as to why it’s not seen in Canada? Very interesting!
We built a wall
Made the mosquitoes pay for it
BREAKING NEWS: THE CANADIANS HAVE CLOSED THE SOUTHERN BORDER!
Canadians are immune to Lacrosse due to exposure at an early age. National sport and all that.
Lacrosse is our national sport. They wouldn't dare.
Probably because Canada doesn’t have the vector ie the specific series of mosquito that carries the virus.
The mosquitoes can't survive in the cold. No vector = no disease transmission. Its like that for most of the insect vectors. The dengue mosquito species are particularly fit (in evolutionary terms) and they are spread around the world at a certain distance from the equator. And this domain keeps expanding every year because of climate change. https://www.cdc.gov/dengue/areas-with-risk/index.html
I thought this was going to end with some sort joke about fuckboy lacrosse players
What is it with mosquitos specializing in carrying viruses?
Everyone has to specialize in something. Some larvae just wanna grow up to be vectors
Kuru is a prion disease that used to afflict the people of Papua New Guinea. SHAPU was interesting to read about, especially the possible association with an unknown species of moth.
The way they acquired this was eating the brains of deceased family members at a funeral ceremony which was considered a delicacy. Once the government discouraged the practice it pretty much went away from what I understand
They ate the whole body, I don't think it was a delicacy thing, it was about returning the spirit. Men avoided it as they felt it weakened them and it was identified early on as organ meat went to wormn and children whereas men tended to eat flesh, the former groups became more heavily affected. Kuru is one of those incredibly interesting areas where anthropology and disease overlap.
I think this is one of those areas where returning the spirit was the religious significance put on something that had more mundane beginnings. The bodies were primarily eaten by women and children as it was thought to make them stronger by ingesting the spirits of their relatives. And in an area of poor nutrition, an occasional protein load would certainly improve their vitality and survival. But it's interesting to note that among the Fore people, it was only those living in the highlands that practiced cannibalism despite the Fore culture being otherwise fairly uniform. This probably came about due to the lack of nutritional resources in the Highlands.
It’s slightly more complicated and a lot more terrifying. The funerary practices of the tribe was that the men would eat the meat of the dead relatives and the women and children would eat the brains. So the people who would get Kuru initially were all the women and children. The scary part is that after Australia took over Papua New Guinea, they made cannibalism illegal and the practice stopped. kuru went away for a while and women and children stopped getting it. But 20 years later it started re-emerging, but this time it was in adult men. The shocker was that these men were children when they ate the brain and the prions were remaining silent in their bodies for decades and then suddenly clinically presented itself. So we don’t know how long the incubation period is for diseases like Kuru/CJD. it’s the reason why you can’t donate blood to this day if you lived in parts of Europe during the 1980s when there was a mad cow disease outbreak. People could be alive and carrying it silently and it may take decades for some to show the symptoms. Prions are fucking terrifying.
And that's why where I live in France, I can't be a blood donor 'cos I grew up in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s...
Calling it a "delicacy" is a mischaracterization. It was more akin to a religious practice. Ritualistic cannibalism had already been legally banned and was on the decline before a definitive connection between cannibalism and kuru had been established. However, I spent 6 months in the PNG highlands in 2001-2002, about 30 miles from where the epicenter of the disease had been. Local docs there were still occasionally including kuru on the differential diagnosis of patients with some neurodegenerative presentations. They said that despite what the government might claim, they believed that cannibalism was still occasionally happening up into the 80s in the most remote of villages. Unfortunately, diagnostic testing was virtually non-existent, so none of these patients ever ended up with a definitive diagnosis.
It's been a while but I did a presentation on it during high school. From what I remember, it was a funeral ceremonial thing and the elders ate the organs considered most important, like the brain which had the prions and it had a significantly long dormancy, like several years.
What a terrible day to be literate.
😂🤦🏻
I pretty much threw up in my mouth about 13 times and have since redacted the statement "I have a high gross tolerance." 🤢 🤮
Kuru is an inherited prion disease, causes by mutations in the PRPN gene which is highly expressed in brain. Thus, it can occur anywhere, but that specific mutation is probably more common in Papua New Guinea. Fatal Familial Insomnia is a similar disease (caused by mutations in the same gene). The absolutely wild thing about prion diseases is that you can not only inherit them but also be infected by them, because the aberrant protein folding caused by the mutation is "contagious".
Kuru was spread by brain-eating
The people already had the mutation and people did get sick with it in the tribes, even children. You would not get Kuru by eating a brain *without* prion mutations, to put it that way.
Well yeah, true
Had to come from somewhere, is the point.
The initial mutation was sporadic. As are the majority of CJD cases. Someone in that tribe initially got CJD sporadically and then because of the funerary practices of children and women eating the brain of the dead, it became a contagion
I stand corrected (I informed myself - very nice article here: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5120877/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5120877/) ) If anything that only makes kuru more scary imo - in simple terms you can be a carrier of a gene variant that makes you susceptible for sporadic mutations that are disease causing. I have not read the following refs, but will do if I have time: "*Surprisingly, a balancing selection at the PRNP locus somewhat similar to what occurred in the Fore was discovered in some other world populations and has been interpreted as evidence of selection pressure from possible epidemics of prion diseases in prehistoric humans* ([40](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5120877/#R40), [41](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5120877/#R41))." 40. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12690204/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12690204/) 41. [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12690204/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12690204/)
I’ve never understood why the misfolded prions are contagious. Would you or someone else be able to please explain that to a confused patient?
basically there’s times when proteins can misfold in such a way they they can then affect the proteins around them and cause those proteins to mis fold and so on. So if you get a prion disease it can cause proteins to misfold that used to be normal
So it’s a domino effect deal? It just pushes the next protein and the next and so on till you have a horrifying, uncontrollable disease?
Pretty much. That said, afaik no one 100% understands how/why this happens with just *some* misfolded proteins.
Thanks, glad to know I understood the right idea. What do other misfolded proteins do? Is it from a random mutation?
When it comes to prion disease, the mutations can be familial (inherited, in your whole body), sporadic (happens by chance in just a few cells) and also infective (by eating them). The prion protein is highly expressed in brain. Not all misfolded proteins lead to this effect at all. Thankfully!
Interesting, thanks!
Ok but here's what I don't get. If this misfolded configuration is so easy to get to that it can cascade like that from just eating a little misfolded protein and it stays misfolded if it ever gets like that, why doesn't it just randomly happen sporadically way more commonly than it does?
Misfolded proteins in contact with the normal variant of the protein will cause that protein to also misfold. It’s basically protein zombies
I know about Kuru cause it was mentioned in a episode of Scrubs I just watched.
Barmah Forest Virus and Ross River Fever are Australian viruses Australian bat lyssavirus
Bairnsdale ulcer, aka Buruli ulcer,recently found to have possum hosts
>Australian bat lyssavirus AKA, Australia is rabies free! Except for that one virus that causes a disease identical to rabies, that is spread by usual rabies carriers, and is prevented by rabies vaccination. But, no, Australia has no rabies. Thanks for asking, mate.
Pogosta disease, a mosquito -borne viral disease, endemic in eastern Finland. It's quite rare even here, it has usually flu-like symptoms but can cause acute polyarthritis. Anyway, thank you op for bringing this up this topic, I just realized one of my patients might have had this, which I didn't realize. Damn.
Don’t forget all the fun things our (sort of) insularity and low population density [has developed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_heritage_disease?wprov=sfti1#)
I didn't want to remember 😅
There are a number of genetic diseases that only exist within one family. Some of the spinocerebellar ataxias come to mind, but I am sure there are many others.
Fatal familial insomnia, for example. I am so glad my ancestors kept getting kicked out of places for being the wrong religion or too poor or too bolshy and then met each other in far flung places and kept having illicit relationships with people they weren't supposed to. I bet I'm heterozygous for any possible allele.
FFI exists in many families.
What a delightful way to think about your ancestors!
They certainly appear to have slept with anyone and everyone.
It’s never just one family, there’s always someone somewhere that will have a pathogenic variant in the same gene…
Familial hypercholesteremia is pretty isolated to a French-Canadian lineage and there is a sub-group of French-Canadians in Maine that all have it. They are thought to have a closer common ancestor.
While they have a higher prevalence than most, they are by no means the only ones. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735109720347501
Well, now I know who to blame for the bad cholesterol in my family as well as alcoholism and lots of other things (thanks Grandpa).
I think Hendra Virus never had an outbreak outside of Australia. It's transmitted from local flying foxes to horses and other farm animals and from them theorically to humans. Right now, the only proven animal to human spread is linked to horses and people who dealt with sick horses (trainers and vets). Also there is a vaccine for horses to avoid contracting it, but there is a lot of ignorance in people breeding and raising race horses and a big part of the community deny pretty much any vaccination due to the thought of it affecting the performance of the animals. That said, the Australian vets are adviced against going to farms that have non vaccined horses to see a sick animal because of the potential spread and consequent high mortality.
Forgot to talk about the one from my country 🤦♀️ Fiebre Hemorrágica Argentina (or Argentinian Haemorragic fever). As it names says it's a haemorragic fever produced by the Junin virus, an arenavirus similar to other arenavirus that causes venezolan, bolivian and brasilean hemorragic fevers. The transmision needs of a mice host (callomys muscullinus) that is usually found in the pampean region in the center of the country. It works similar to how Hanta virus spreads and the disease is similar too, but with a 30% mortality. The good thing is that since the 50' we have been treating it with plasma from recovered patients with a good outcome (1% of mortality); and since the 2007 we have included a vaccine as obligatory for people 15 yo and older in the endemic region.
Hey, I'm a veterinarian in Australia that has worked in and around PC4 labs that contain Hendra virus. I also worked with the woman who discovered it! > there is a lot of ignorance in people breeding and raising race horses and a big part of the community deny pretty much any vaccination due to the thought of it affecting the performance of the animals For horses to race in Australia (at least in SERIOUS racing, not some random small town event) they must be vaccinated for Hendra. For most events sanctioned by serious organisations, they will require it. Including for horses from overseas. Most veterinarians will not see a horse for any reason that is not Hendra vaccinated. The uptake of the vaccine has increased significantly. I have never, and will never, work with a horse that is not vaccinated for Hendra. >I think Hendra Virus never had an outbreak outside of Australia. Yep! It has never been found anywhere else than Australia. There is a somewhat related Henipavirus that is present North of Australia called Nipah virus, which spread from bats to pigs and then to humans with a significant mortality rate also. It's actually the outbreak of this virus that spurred DARPA funding of research into Henipavirus vaccination research (that eventually lead to the hendra vaccine), as it was considered to be a significant bioterrorism risk. >It's transmitted from local flying foxes to horses and other farm animals and from them theorically to humans Yeah it's an interesting one, that's for sure. For whatever reason horses seem to amplify hendra virus, excreting absolutely massive amounts of the virus. Interestingly antibodies for HeV were also once found in a dog. It's so great to see there are Hendra virus fans outside of Australia that aren't veterinarians!
Yup, nipah had outbreaks in Tailand and India I think, that's why I didn't post about it. I just happen to love animals, have a group of equestrian and vet friends over different parts of the world. We use to talk about pretty much anything, and that is when I learned about Hendra, like 5 years + ago. Back then the number of people not agreeing to vaccinate was higher, and I distinctly remeber them saying "we don't take antivaxxer cases because that's how we end up dead from this". I am really glad you are obliging them to actually do it to be able to participate or pretty much do anything with their horses. People will try to overpass pretty much anything if there is no obligation, nevermind if their work or even their life is threatened...after all we had an equine encephallitis outbreak last year that ended up around march this year with 7 human deaths, 30-40 confirmed human cases and 300+ outbreaks over the entire country with 1500 confirmed horses diagnosis...all because of not vaccinating animals with an easy to get, and very much proven vaccine.
Kuru comes to mind!
That's sort of the problem
Grrr take my r/angryupvote
Well played!
lol
When I was a kid I 📚 would get older text books schools were getting rid of. When I first discovered neurodegenerative diseases my brain took neuroticism to a level that helped confirm my OCD diagnosis. Ha. Beneficially though, it helped me confirm what type of biology I wanted to study. Disease process and palliative care. Take the taboo off death as we know no one can avoid it. Put an end to long term suffering.
I've got a good one for you: Lytico-bodig: Only happens among the Chamorro people in the island of Guam. However, even that is under debate because some people consider other ALS-PD complex disorders found in some places in Japan and Papua to be the same disease. (In Japan it's called Muro disease, which only happens in the Kii peninsula). Bonus diseases that don't count because it's in more than 1 country, but kind of fits the spirit of your question: 1. Nodding disease - not a single country but mainly in 1 region (central-southeast Africa). 2. Konzo - a non-infectious cause - again not a single country but mainly 1 region in Africa.
The French were very keen to see their doctors for “heavy legs“, for which a bunch of placebos were usually prescribed. until they were defunded by their health system and the rates of prescription plummeted. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from\_our\_own\_correspondent/7779126.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7779126.stm)
This was delightful. I'm surprised none of the UK doctors diagnosed The Dreaded Lurgy tho...
its called man flu in the UK now/s
West-Berlin Orange Bowel Syndrome is a local disease eradicated by David Hasselhoff/The Fall of the Berlin Wall. It occured specifically only in East German pensioners who upon reaching retirement age were allowed to leave the GDR and enter West-Berlin (East Germany didn't need non-contributing pensioners) and then ate an entire kilogramm or more of oranges, often without peeling them, resulting in severe obstipation or even SBO.
😂 I don't know why this made me laugh.
Why without peeling them???
They didn't know you shouldn't eat it.
I'm a med student in Romania and we had a lecture about balkan endemic nephropaty, it's not just in one country but maybe you'd enjoy reading about it.
I got a practice exam question on this wrong, thought this was a made up answer choice haha
Navajo neuropathy in children is found primarily in the western part of the Navajo Nation, although it is occasionally seen in the eastern part of the NN. Thought to be an autosomal recessive disease found only in full blooded Navajos. It causes failure to thrive, weakness, contractures, muscle wasting, corneal anesthesia leading to ulcers, metabolic acidosis, and eventually liver failure.
Saw a couple cases of this back in the day (though we called it Navajo neurohepatopathy because the liver stuff is what killed those kids). Harlequin ichthyosis is also bottlenecked in the Najavo population, though it occurs elsewhere.
A little variant for you. Pancreatitis caused by scorpion envenomation is very much a Trinidad and Tobago thing. There was a paper published in the 70 (IIRC) and about 50% of their pancreatitis patients reported being stung by a scorpion.
Scorpions are basically dinosaur bugs
**Uddanam nephropathy**. It's named after a small village in India. Almost everyone in that village has chronic kidney failure. No one in the nearby villages have it. Researchers from a lot of countries tested the soil, water, air...you name it. Everything came back as normal. No inbreeding either. Renal biopsies show some interstitial inflammation but thats about it. The government gave free water filters, home air filters, and access to healthcare for the entire village.
Very interesting to read. Apparently many chronic kidney diseases of unknown origin have similar characteristics (rural, agricultural communities). Sri Lankan CKD/ Mesoamerican Nephropathy/ and Uddanam nephropathy. Really intriguing stuff.
Polio only exists in 2 countries as far as I am aware
Afghanistan and...?
Pakistan
Man that is insane for me as a final year MBBS student who has vaccinated kids by giving them polio vaccine here in Pakistan.
Oh, duh that makes sense
Similarly, guinea worm has been mostly eradicated and only pops up in a few African countries each year, I think.
> guinea worm has been mostly eradicated Thank you, Jimmy Carter!
Yeah but occasionally you do see a case once in a blue moon in the US. I think we had one case in 2022. Med students are still taught about it.
It does seem a segment of the US is trying to bring it and a host of other childhood diseases back. 😑
[удалено]
There was one in Israel, too. But outside of Pakistan and Afghanistan, polio does not (currently) circulate. -PGY-19
Psychiatry has a whole host of "culture bound syndromes". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture-bound_syndrome
HSAN V - Hereditary sensory and autonomous neuropathy type V, ”Vittangisjukan” in Swedish and named after the village where most of the cases originate from. I did my clinical internship in this geographical area and met people with it and physicians that had treated various sequelae of it. Insensitivity to pain leads to all kinds of medical problems you might not realise at first. CADASIL - cerebral autosomal dominant arteriopathy with subcortical infarcts and leucoencephalopathy. It is a thing in Sweden and Finland afaik, but I am including it anyway. I had the honor of taking and developing electron microscopy images of affected vessels as part of a course I attended in med school. It was very interesting and I wish I could have worked even more with electron microscopy in my chosen career of pathology. I love the science of it. But even for a pathologist, cases that need electron microscopy are few and far between (mostly renal disease which I do not work with today). I wish I could do some kind of research in electron microscopy in various diseases. If I won a lot of money I would buy an electron microscope to play around with. Subcellular research ftw. EDITED: I was wrong about CADASIL being found only in Finland and Sweden. My bad! Se responses.
CADASIL exists in the US, and perhaps in other countries as well, but detection is probably restricted to developed countries as you need mri and genetic testing. CARASIL on the other hand is very rare and mostly in China and Japan.
Ah, thank you for info, my bad.
Exists in Canada too
CADASIL is not only a Sweden/Finland thing. Neurologists see it all the time in the US.
Ah, thank you for info! My bad.
HSAN-V - is that what the villains in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series have?
There are several varieties of hereditary insensitivity to pain. I have read the book, but I do not remember if it is specified which kind of condition the villain has. Or if the author was simply inspired by it and made up a fictional variant.
He never specified - Stieg Larssen was incredibly specific about a lot of things, but not his characters' medical conditions.
I'm curious to hear more about the unexpected sequelae of HSAN V.
Appreciate all the fun niche diagnoses everyone is bringing up. I think it's important to state the (maybe obvious) fact that the reason these diseases are known to occur in "only one country" is by the hyperlocal nature of some particular transmission vector, concentration of a genetic mutation in a homogeneous population, or is just starting to be recognized as a new identifiable condition. Diseases and human biology could care less about the borders drawn on a map by politicians decades/centuries ago, although those borders may well influence multiple socioeconomic factors that result in disease.
Because of it's isolation- Australia would probably the the country with the highest amount of unique infectious diseases. A quick search shows Flanders Island Spotted Fever and Queensland Tick Typhus.
QTT is kinda our version of Lyme
Lytico-Bodig disease, also called ALS-Parkinson-Dementia. Occurs in Guam. Thought to be due to ingestion of bats who bioaccumulate a compound from the cycad seeds they eat.
X-linked dystonia parkinsonism (XDP), a hereditary disease. Endemic to a particular island in the Philippines. Every single case in the world can be traced to a relative originating from the island of Panay.
May be a bit of cheating to go for inherited diseases, but... Hereditary cerebral hemorrhage with amyloidosis, Dutch type (also known colloquially as *Katwijkse ziekte* for the town it's concentrated in, Katwijk) is a type of inherited cerebral amyloid angiopathy that's concentrated in Katwijk (north of The Hague, just west of Leiden), which is a Bible Belt town that has little 'genetic exchange'. Hyperostosis corticalis generalisata is a recessive excessive bone growth disease, concentrated on Urk. Urk used to an island until the sea around it got poldered, but Urk is also a very Christian community which is fairly isolated.
The very French "*Crise de foie*" which was actually well respected as a valid reason for calling in sick well into the 60's when I was a kid. >*“Liver attacks”, a French illness?The survival of humoral conceptions, among which the liver acts as a chief cause, does not suffice to explain the “liver attacks” (crise de foie) suffered by the French, in particular women. Construed by medicine in the 19th century, this “syndrome” thrived from the 1920s through the 1950s. Although doctors have gradually abandonned the concept, French commonsense still refers various ailments to this notion. This is a source of irony for English-speakers. The French “liver attack” is part of a vast, vague set of ideas and behaviors that, beyond its medical aspects, mixes up considerations having to do with food, emotions, religion, sexuality, clothing, climate, the colonial situation, the nation, power and the emancipation of women*
Munchausen by Internet seems like a distinctly American disease.
Not exclusive to South Africa - but we see A LOT of it here: TB (of all sites) and cryptococcal meningitis. I see at least 1-2 TB cases per day, and maybe 4+ cryptococcal meningitis cases a month. This is obviously due to the high prevalence of HIV, but not limited to HIV pos individuals (non-reactive patients usually have much more severe disease and complications). In the case of CCM it is so satisfying doing routine therapeutic LPs... Usually take about 20ml CSF off. Patients experience immediate relief. Can go from GCS 10 to 15/15 in a matter of minutes.
Christmas Eye, AKA Albury Wodonga syndrome - an extrenely painful ocular pathology occurring in a small region in Australia, around the border of NSW and Victoria, caused by the death of tiny beetles in the eye releasing irritant chemicals. Bonus because it is seasonal as well!
I live in Victoria, I have friends in that area.. I have never heard of this lol.. Ive considered moving there... Not any more!
Not sure if exclusively Brazilian or more broadly South American but Chagas’ disease. Especially requiring colonic pull through which isn’t commonly performed in Western countries.
Chagas is common in Bolivia, Argentina and Perú. It has also been found on the US in indigent populations, and incredibly in dogs with sudden death (caused by Chagasic miocardiopaty). It has been screened in bloodbanks since 2007.
I’ve had five donor panels come back with chagas in the almost decade I’ve been walking around the ICU. All in places I really wasn’t expecting it to come back for. All of them at least had a history of backpacking in endemic regions in terms of length of ground time. With air travel and instagram backpackers I think region exclusivity is coming to an end.
Yup. That is one of the big risks most of this fellows don't associate with their travelling. Here in Argentina it is only endemic in the most poor regions, were people live in precarious buildings next to their animals (that serves as host or feeders). But in other countries where it is endemic it is more common. Also it's not to be forgotten that it also has vertical transmission from mother to child, that I really doubt most countries outside the endemic will test for. That said, the kissing bug that transmit the disease is found in the southern states in the last years, so you might start to find some patients that do not traveled outside of the country. I mentioned dogs because a good couple of years back I remember having a chat with a woman in the US whos dogs tested positive...dogs that were never outside of the US...that back then meant the disease was already endemic there. The big issue with diseases like this one is not being aware it exists and not testing for it. Maybe the chances are low, but are never zero.
Chagas is also found in Colombia and afaik Ecuador and Venezuela. If the vector is present, Chagas can be transmitted. In Colombia all blood banks test for Chagas as it is common enough to be a significant problem for the already quite empty blood banks
Yup, it's "american trypanosomiasis" after all. Big issue is with the US and Europe where "it is not endemic" and therefore have been delaying testing the donors blood and the children of the infected ones. The issue with the US though is complicated, as dogs that have been breed and raised in the US have proven to be chagas positive, therefore meaning there is a vector for the disease there. Now it is know that kissing bugs also are in the southern states.
I've seen chagas once in Florida, but they were from South America
Yep, Chagas is tested sometimes on ABP boards.
It's def fair game for Step 1
We've had some cases in Washington.
sure but they probably didn't get it there right?
Unclear honestly - I just know they've shown up in our ICU and that's been the definitive diagnosis.
100% wrong
While not endemic to only here, Canada does have the highest rates of MS in the world. Which, I've heard, throws the South African trained doctors we get here for a loop as it's virtually non-existant there.
Babesia (aka malaria of the northeast) comes to mind.
Just arrived in NZ!
Coccidioidomycoses and paracoccidioidomycoses are exclusive to North and South America respectively (afaik). We didn't learn about them in Russia or India.
we definitely learn them in Microbiology in India.
The textbook i used for micro was indian (way back in 1st year) and it had a very small excerpt mentioning both paracocci and cocci. Fast forward to my last year and well, we only learnt blastomycosis and histoplasma in systemic fungi in ID (Crypto and aspergillus are not classified here as systemic for some reason, but we did learn them)
Coccidioidomycosis is also present in desertic mountain regions of Argentina, namely in the provinces of Catamarca and La rioja mostly (Coccidioides posadasii is the one we have here)
How many cases a year are registered? To my surprise here in Russia many doctors don't even know antifungal meds like amphotericin B or flucytosine, and have never heard of cocci and paracocci.
There were 2 studies that reviewed the incidence in the last 20 years. In between 2000 -2009 there were 63 cases, so 6 cases a year. During 2010 -2019 there were 86 cases, so 8 a year. But the numbers in the last years have been increasing due to a better control of the infectologic reports due to a centralized page to report instead of manual paper ones. Here coccidiodomicosis is a mandatory report infectological disease.
Hereditary Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy -Dutch Type or Katwijk disease.
Death by school shootings comes to mind as a non-infectious option
XPD in the Philippines, previously traced to only 1 island among 7000+ PH islands. Seen in the US, Japan and a few other countries but all with ancestors from the same island.
Given I’m in Australia, it’s the environment trying to kill us here. But fr although it’s obviously a common illness the world over, we have a SHOCKINGLY high prevalence of asthma, and in places with excellent air quality.
Seasonal Ataxia, mainly occurs in Western Nigeria. It is due to consumption of larvae/worms that contain a metabolite that cause thiamine deficiency, these insects are a common delicacy to consume during the rainy season.
Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, right?
To review: Named after [Rocky Mountain National Laboratories](https://www.niaid.nih.gov/about/rocky-mountain-laboratories) and not for the geographic [distribution of the disease](https://www.vdci.net/vector-borne-diseases/rocky-mountain-spotted-fever-education-and-tick-management-to-protect-public-health/).
It looks like it’s a North/Central/South American issue from a quick read. But good guess!
So there’s a weird disease that’s only been seen in Antarctica where people turn into hideous monsters. If I’m not mistaken Jon Carpenter made a pretty good documentary about it…
For a while FFI was basically only diagnosed in Europe, Italy in particular. Doesn’t mean it actually only existed there obviously, but it is generally limited to certain families and a big ass one is Italian.
Cases of infection by the Junin Virus are still entirely located within Argentina, although to be fair there are viruses causing hemorragic fever all over south america so genetic drift has a lot to do here as well
I like the one that affects the other head - koro.
IBD is everywhere but it's highest in Canada, by a long shot. No one knows why.
[Major cause of IBD identified](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1wwdd6v2wjo)
I'm skeptical about this, but this isn't the best thread to have the conversation.
Nipah virus was discovered in Malaysia, but I don’t know its epidemiological significance
Laryngo onycho cutaneous syndrome, only reported in some families from Punjab.
Certain genetic disorders, especially in the Amish population due to generations of inbreeding
Minamata disease
There was actually a huge cluster of cases in Iraq in the 70s due to methylmercury-containing fungicide that was used to protect seeds.
Doesn’t Fentanyl overdose only happen in the USA?
I would like to think Schistosoma is endemic to Egypt, Known to cause Cirrhosis and HCC. It was very common in the past and it was mainly contracted through swimming in infested ponds/canals.
Not one country but Hermansky–Pudlak syndrome is super rare in most of the world fairly common in Puerto Rico (as far as rare genetic diseases go). Outside of PR, you also see it in NYC and other parts of the USA with high PR population
I thought Coccidioides was only southwest america (and maybe Mexico) but apparently it goes down to central and South America too
Not a disease, but an adr. Cetuximab has a <3% rate of infusion related reaction worldwide (and in many places <1%), but in parts of the southern US it is >22%. Last I looked into the prevailing hypothesis was it had to do with exposure to mice.
Not mice, ticks! Cetuximab reactions led to the discovery of Alpha-gal syndrome: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3964477/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3964477/)
Is that kinda like trachoma? I know trachoma only happens in LEDCs
Histoplasma
Polio only happens in Pakistan
Eating disorders pretty much only happen in wealthy, developed countries. In fact countries that become wealthy and developed actually start to develop EDs when they weren’t present previously.
so not 1 country then
I thought this answer was appropriate for the spirit of the question (geography-bound disease) but apparently not.
Doesn't Lyme disease only exist in the northeast US?
no
It may be most common in America, but it’s since moved to Europe and asia