Okay, everybody, CALM DOWN. You can stop panicking now. I am delighted – no, relieved – to announce that we finally have a klezmer song about toxoplasmosis.
Via JVoices:
What is toxoplasmosis, you ask? Why, it’s the scary brain parasite that I PROBABLY TOTALLY HAVE. I’m forgetful. Also I get writer’s block a lot. Therefore: toxo.
It’s the only plausible explanation.
Also, if you’re in L.A., you should come to the Doikayt seder tomorrow. I will be there! We will exchange sholem aleychems and then do hipster dances.
(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)
It’s mostly harmless to people. You get it from cats. ;)
I really, really enjoyed that. Thank you.
And I grew up with four cats! Hello! Obviously I caught it.
Chingona – the rest of their stuff is pretty great, too – http://www.myspace.com/thepaintedbird. I’m kind of in love with “Yosl Ber.”
Ha! I just spent the last hour hunting them down around the Internet and listening to those same clips. There’s a lot of klezmer I’m kind of meh on, but this I really like. (And of course, as a former Peace Corps volunteer, who did health education no less, I have a soft spot in my heart for songs about parasites. I only regret they couldn’t find a verse in there for my beloved botfly.)
Ugh… botflies. I think there’s a three-way tie for my personal most-disgusting-parasites-ever list: river blindness, because who needs worms squirming in your eyes? Not me.
Liver flukes, because I would like to kill my own liver, tyvm.
and guinea worms
Of course, the hookworm presence in the southern states is always disgusting too. Night soil…
Leishmaniasis. Where I lived, they were starting to get a critical mass (from an epidemiological perspective) of leishmaniasis cases, and the WHO had brought in the medicine for it and was giving it away for free in an attempt to curb a big outbreak. There was a woman who might have been from the poorest family in my village who had it on her face. They wouldn’t give her the medicine until she wasn’t pregnant or nursing, and she was ALWAYS pregnant or nursing. Meanwhile, the leishmaniasis was spreading from between her eyes, down her nose and across her face. (For those not clicking the link, it’s a flesh-eating type of thing.)
Also Chagas. Bug bite and flu like symptoms, then you go about your business. Twenty years later … your heart explodes! The idea that one bug bite turns your own body into a ticking time bomb really freaks me out.
That’s real!?! I thought that was an urban legend!
Maybe not exactly real, but it might as well be. Sudden death from cardiac damage, all because of a bug bite decades earlier is good (or bad) enough for me. It doesn’t say it here, but I believe it can weaken the heart so much that it bursts. I have been told that by medical professionals. For whatever that’s worth.
Anyway …
The heart doesn’t explode, so much as the cardiac muscle is damaged, and the heart becomes enlarged. So, you actually die of a big, ineffective heart. (and not uncommonly because of sex. the bugs that carry the parasite are often eaten in S. and Central American countries as an aphrodisiac.)
the bugs that carry the parasite are often eaten in S. and Central American countries as an aphrodisiac
Okay, now it’s my turn to say … really?? I have lived and traveled pretty extensively in South and Central America, as well as having an amateur interest in folk medicine, and I have never heard of this. Not saying you’re wrong, but I’ve never heard of such a thing.
Unfortunately, yes.
Well, learn something new every day. I guess I’m still skeptical it’s a widespread practice throughout most countries in the region (Nobody I know did that! My anecdota does too equal data!), but that link and the number of hits when I did my own Google search have convinced me that some people do eat them for enhancement.