There's usually a scary story thread, or a thread on Slenderman or the SCP Foundation, but that stuff is all made up. We live in a very frightening world which does not require fiction in order to scare the living bejeezus out of you. I'm constantly surprised by the things I find out about, either just randomly chatting with forumers here or through my own dedicated internet research (read: being bored and having nothing better to do) that are god damn frightening. And I'm not just talking about Australia, although for a certainty 95% of the things in this world that are borne from the colon of the great Satan himself call Australia home.
I'll just give an example to start things off.
Naegleria fowleri
![tumblr_lwek49BKkU1qbcssro1_500.jpg]()
This is a protist, and it might be the scariest one in the entire world. Sure it looks like a blob in that picture, but what you don't know is just how much it will kill the ever-loving piss out of you.
N. fowleri lives in fresh water, and so you're safe from this thing if you swim in the ocean (you're not safe from other things, but that's a different story). You might think that if you keep to your swimming pool you'll be fine, but another thing you don't know is how wrong you just were. N. fowleri has been known to inhabit recreational water sources (such as fresh water dams, reservoirs, lakes, etc.) and... drum roll please... poorly-chlorinated swimming pools. After you hear exactly what it does, any pool owner would be forgiven for turning their swimming pool into a chlorine chemical bath until the end of time.
It's true, it's rare that a human is infected with this organism. But when it happens, there is a 98% fatality rate. Here's how it murders your guts. It invades your nostrils when they enter water containing this organism, causing necrosis of the olfactory bulbs as well as hemorrhaging on its way to make you dead. But that's just sort of a bonus feature.
It's on its way to your brain. So it can eat it.
Wikipedia describes the mechanism by which this happens as: "The organism begins to consume cells of the brain piecemeal by means of a unique sucking apparatus extended from its cell surface." Think about that for a second. What part is scarier? The "consume cells of the brain piecemeal" or "by means of a unique sucking apparatus"?
But Josh, you can just get to a hospital as soon as you notice something is wrong, right? WRONG. In the rare case where symptoms appear before this thing multiplies and kills you by eating your fucking brains, you have literally minutes before this hell-spawned piece of crap changes forms from a trophozoite to a flagellate, and once that happens in your brain and it starts feasting, you might as well just start writing your last will and goodbye letters to your friends and relatives, because this triggers the onset of primary amoebic meningoencephalitis. There's an antifungal drug called Amphotericin B which can kill this guy before PAM sets in, but survival rate after you are a PAM case is less than 1%. But most of the time, they don't even know this is what you had until they perform an autopsy on you and find out your brain is gone (actually they're probably still eating it at that point, but they can still culture it. Carefully).
Don't be too afraid. Between 2001 and 2010, only 32 infections of N. fowleri were reported in the US. Everybody who was infected died:
Youch, killed by a neti pot and tap water. Water way to go. (ba-dum-tish)
![FoRCn0f.jpg?1]()
See you in your nightmares! Om nom nom nom...
I'll just give an example to start things off.
Naegleria fowleri
This is a protist, and it might be the scariest one in the entire world. Sure it looks like a blob in that picture, but what you don't know is just how much it will kill the ever-loving piss out of you.
N. fowleri lives in fresh water, and so you're safe from this thing if you swim in the ocean (you're not safe from other things, but that's a different story). You might think that if you keep to your swimming pool you'll be fine, but another thing you don't know is how wrong you just were. N. fowleri has been known to inhabit recreational water sources (such as fresh water dams, reservoirs, lakes, etc.) and... drum roll please... poorly-chlorinated swimming pools. After you hear exactly what it does, any pool owner would be forgiven for turning their swimming pool into a chlorine chemical bath until the end of time.
It's true, it's rare that a human is infected with this organism. But when it happens, there is a 98% fatality rate. Here's how it murders your guts. It invades your nostrils when they enter water containing this organism, causing necrosis of the olfactory bulbs as well as hemorrhaging on its way to make you dead. But that's just sort of a bonus feature.
It's on its way to your brain. So it can eat it.
Wikipedia describes the mechanism by which this happens as: "The organism begins to consume cells of the brain piecemeal by means of a unique sucking apparatus extended from its cell surface." Think about that for a second. What part is scarier? The "consume cells of the brain piecemeal" or "by means of a unique sucking apparatus"?
But Josh, you can just get to a hospital as soon as you notice something is wrong, right? WRONG. In the rare case where symptoms appear before this thing multiplies and kills you by eating your fucking brains, you have literally minutes before this hell-spawned piece of crap changes forms from a trophozoite to a flagellate, and once that happens in your brain and it starts feasting, you might as well just start writing your last will and goodbye letters to your friends and relatives, because this triggers the onset of primary amoebic meningoencephalitis. There's an antifungal drug called Amphotericin B which can kill this guy before PAM sets in, but survival rate after you are a PAM case is less than 1%. But most of the time, they don't even know this is what you had until they perform an autopsy on you and find out your brain is gone (actually they're probably still eating it at that point, but they can still culture it. Carefully).
Don't be too afraid. Between 2001 and 2010, only 32 infections of N. fowleri were reported in the US. Everybody who was infected died:
Wikipedia, yeah. Sorry. wrote:In October 2002, two Peoria, Arizona, five-year-olds died after being exposed to untreated water supplied by Rose Valley Water.
In August 2005, two Oklahoma boys, ages seven and nine, were killed by N. fowleri after swimming in the hot, stagnant water of lakes in the Tulsa area.
In 2007, six cases were reported in the U.S., all fatal.
August 2010, 7-year-old Kyle Lewis died from the brain-eating amoeba Naegleria fowleri after swimming in fresh water in Texas. The Kyle Lewis Amoeba Awareness Foundation was subsequently created to raise awareness of this amoeba and the deadly infection it causes.
In 2011, two Louisiana residents died after becoming infected by using neti pots with household tap water, leading to CDC recommendations against using untreated tap water.
Youch, killed by a neti pot and tap water. Water way to go. (ba-dum-tish)
See you in your nightmares! Om nom nom nom...