• From people that can’t stop dancing to one of the most feared diseases of the
century, we count 14 diseases that science can’t explain.
14 – Dancing Mania, • The dancing plague of 1518 is the most
prominent outbreak of dancing mania in history, where 400 people began to start dancing in
Strasbourg in July and didn’t stop dancing for a long time.
• Some of the people afflicted danced for a period of about a month, many of those that
danced suffered from heart attacks stroke and all had some level of exhaustion.
• To this day scientists don’t know what caused dancing mania, it’s assumed to be
a social phenomenon of a psychological origin but for all we know it’s a type of brain
altering virus of some kind.
13 – Exploding Head Syndrome, • It’s not nearly as exciting as it sounds,
but it’s still interesting and the cause is still largely unknown.
• Exploding head syndrome is a type of auditory hallucination where those afflicted with it
hear loud, non-existent, noises or an explosive feeling when they’re about to fall asleep
or as they’re waking up.
• It’s worth noting that this isn’t the same thing as that falling feeling you
get sometimes when you’re going to sleep, but it’s possibly related.
12 – Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Syndrome, • Another poorly named disorder, but an
interesting one nonetheless, the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine showed extremely exaggerated startle
reflexes to the point where it was restricting their ability to live a normal life.
• The men that suffered from this disability the worst would obey any command if it was
given suddenly enough, even if it meant striking someone they loved.
• The cause for this disorder is still unknown but it’s theorised that it could be a genetic
condition, there’s other theories where it’s a behavioural disorder caused by a
formed habit of positive reinforcement.
11 – Bleeding Calf Syndrome, • This disease causes calves of 21 days
or younger to bleed excessively, although the worst of the bleeding is internal and
this is generally what causes the calves to die.
• While vets have figured out what causes the bleeding, a lack of a vital aspect in
the blood called Platelets, this can happen in other animals but there’s still a lot
they don’t understand.
• For instance they don’t know why the calves are lacking in platelets, they also
don’t know if the disease is even infectious or if there’s any risk of it transferring
to humans via mutation. 10 – Water Allergy,
• While this disease isn’t actually an allergy as it isn’t related to histamines,
it’s still a negative reaction that some people have when they come in contact with
water.
• Usually the symptoms involve hives when exposed to water on their skin, although in
some extreme cases people even get swelling in their oral region when attempting to drink
water.
• But this isn’t a reaction that is caused by impurities like chlorine like you might
suspect, as the scientists have conducted trials with distilled water and medical saline.
• There’s no known cause for this type of urticarial and treatment is difficult.
9 – Sweating Sickness, • This was a disease that started in England
in 1485 and it spread quickly throughout Britain and eventually spread to mainland Europe.
• The symptoms were a high amount of sweat, cold shivers, giddiness a headache and once
symptoms showed up it usually only took a couple hours before the patient would die.
• Most people think that it was caused by poor sanitation, but it’s still largely
unknown exactly what about this caused the sickness and why it hasn’t appeared again
in poorly sanitised areas in the modern era.
8 – Brainerd Diarrhoea, • This disease comes suddenly and once the
symptoms arise they don’t go away for months, or sometimes even years.
• The diarrhoea is described as watery and explosive and it’s not treatable with antibiotics,
there have been ten reports of the disease since 1983 and nine of them were in the United
States.
• It’s generally thought to be caused by consuming raw milk and untreated water,
but while this is mostly accepted amongst the medical industry it’s mostly unproven
and could just be an irrelevant correlation.
7 – Stiff Person Syndrome, • SPS is a rare disorder of a neurological
nature, the stiffness mainly affects the torso and also includes spasms that cause deformed
postures such as being hunched over in a pained fashion.
• It only occurs in around one in a million people and generally happens when the sufferer
is in their middle-ages, it was first found in 1956 and treatment targets the stiffness
symptoms.
• No cure or fully functional treatment is known as of yet as the cause of the disease
is still unknown, although it is known that there's a large amount of glutamic acid in
most, but not all patients.
6 – Sleepy Sickness, • Also known as encephalitis lethargica,
this disease targets the brain, making those that have it feel sleepy and eventually become
locked into an unmoving state where they can’t speak or move any part of their body voluntarily.
• The starting symptoms are high fever, a sore through, headaches, tiredness, double
vision, lowered mental acuity tremors and some patients even experience psychosis, which
involves having hallucinations and a paranoid state of mind.
• It’s thought that the disease might be linked to previously having diseases that
target your throat like Strep throat, thus lowering your immune system and damaging a
part of your brain known as the basal ganglia, although the studies behind this were not
conclusive. 5 – Nodding Disease,
• This one showed up in the 1960s in Sudan that only affects children between the ages
of 5 and 15, once affected the children will have stunted growth in both the body and the
brain, leaving them mentally handicapped.
• Nodding disease hasn’t been properly studied so starting symptoms are only known
via hearsay, but the most prominent symptom that most agree on is the nodding seizures
that all that contract the disease experience.
• There’s no known cure or cause for this disease but it’s been noted that every case
occurred near where a parasitic worm called onchocerca volvulus thrives.
4 – Vampire Disease, • Also known as hereditary porphyria, is
a disease where the skin becomes white thanks to anemia and becomes incredibly sensitive
to light, also hair tends to grow fast and thicker than usual.
• Also sores on the skin can develop the will eventually distort and destroy the nose
and fingers, not only that but garlic also contains a chemical that exacerbates the symptoms
of this disease.
• While it’s known that the disease is passed on via genetics, not much else is known
about it, there are a few drugs that treat it by interacting with the liver, but it’s
not reliable and many different drugs need to be tried out on each individual patient.
3 – Ebola and Lujo, • Both of these diseases are hemorrhagic
fevers, which is the medical way of saying that your organs bleed until they’re nothing
but liquid and you cry blood.
• Until recently it was almost impossible to study either of these diseases because
they killed so quickly and efficiently, although it is known that this is a characteristic
of diseases not native to humans as killing the host too quickly, or at all, isn’t beneficial
for the disease.
• Lately it’s been thought that Ebola comes from bats, although this still hasn’t
been proven and Lujo still remains completely unknown as to its origins.
2 - Prions, • You might be more familiar with the term
Mad Cow Disease, which is a type of prion, basically all that a prion is, is a protein
that flips from left-handed, to right-handed, that’s it.
• There’s no known way to treat prions, nor prevent them as cooking doesn’t kill
them, not only that but it’s incurable and could take years to show any symptoms.
• It’s not known how these occur, but it’s known that you’ll get them if you
eat the wrong things, for cows it’s cow meat and for humans it’s human brains, but
they also occasionally naturally occur in your system and we don’t know why.
1 - SIDS, • SIDS is short for sudden infant death
syndrome and it’s a disease that comes completely out of nowhere and kills a child, SIDS is
responsible for 80% of sudden infant deaths and we do not understand it whatsoever.
• That doesn’t stop us from researching though, the red nose foundation is the charity
behind most of the funding towards researching its causes, but so far we’ve never knowingly
prevented it or even diagnosed it before the infant dies.
• Even when we perform an autopsy after the infant dies nothing can be found out of
the ordinary, this is the most unknown and deadly disease that plagues humans that we
know of.