The Condition

0:00Today's podcast will feature two medical mysteries that sound like they are straight out of a horror movie. The audio from both of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode. The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description. The first story you'll hear is called Gasp, and it's about a horrifying medical condition that was discovered when multiple people began presenting these same life-threatening symptoms. And the second and final story you'll hear is called All in Their Heads, and it's about a mysterious disease that almost wipes out an entire native tribe.

0:33But where this disease comes from will make you squirm. But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the strange, dark, and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday. So if that's of interest to you, please buy the Amazon Music Follow button, a gift certificate to a massage parlor. But before they go in, make sure to replace all the massage oils with honey and fire ants. Okay, let's get into our first story called Gasp.

1:47We'll see you next time. any plan at ahs.com slash Mr. Ballin and see promo details. See ahs.com slash contracts for coverage details, including service fees, limitations, and exclusions. Choice hotels get you more of what you value. Here's a little tune to help you remember. Same drive, different day. Don't you wish you were getting away? Pack your bags and come on through. Texas, Ohio, Alaska, We're up there, too. Comfort Inn. It's calling your name. Save on the stay. Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim. Well, I hope you like my little song. Book direct at choicehiltales.com.

2:38At 5.30 p.m. on November 21, 2016, Jodi Santoro, who was a 21-year-old mother in Melbourne, Australia, woke up to the sound of her four-month-old son crying. Outside, there was this horrible thunderstorm going on. All this rain and hail were pelting the roof, and the wind was so strong that all the windows in the house were rattling. Jodi reached over and grabbed her phone on the nightstand and checked the time, and she saw right away that she had overslept. However, it had been a really hot day that day, and she was so drained from the heat and also taking care of a four-month-old that she wasn't really surprised she'd overslept.

3:14But as the sound of her son's cries intensified, Jodi knew no matter how tired she was, she needed to get up and go tend to him. But the instant her legs swung off the bed and she actually tried to stand up, she knew something was wrong and it had nothing to do with being tired. She had this incredible sense of dizziness come over her and then her chest suddenly tightened up to the point where she could barely even breathe in. She found herself grabbing the bed just to steady herself. However, as alarming as this was, Jodi didn't panic. She knew this feeling. She had been dealing with asthma for years, and she knew this was the start of an asthma attack.

3:51And so Jodi reached over for her inhaler on the nightstand. She picked it up, brought it to her lips, pressed it down, and then took in a measured breath of the medication, expecting to pretty much immediately feel relief. But she didn't. The inhaler wasn't working. Jodi again pressed down the inhaler harder this time and took a bigger breath in, hoping that a bit more medication might do the trick, but again, it just was not working. And so now, with panic rising inside of her, she's still struggling to breathe, her son is still freaking out and she can't tend to him, and all she was thinking is, I have to get my nebulizer, which is basically a more robust version of an inhaler.

4:28It provides more medication more quickly into your body. However, the nebulizer, which was just over in her closet, required some setup, and she knew she felt so frantic right now and she was shaking so much that she didn't think she'd be able to set it up or even set it up in time before she passed out. Just then, her fiancé walked into the bedroom, drawn there by the sound of their son crying. But the second he walked in, his attention was not on their son, it was instead on Jody, who by now was clutching the bed and kind of hobbled over and very clearly having some sort of medical emergency.

5:01Jody turned to him and began to say, I can't breathe. But her fiancé already knew she had asthma. He knew what these attacks looked like. And so without even needing to be told, he rushed to the closet, set up her nebulizer, and then put the mask right over her face. And as soon as it was, Jodi took in the biggest inhale she possibly could, really believing this was going to stop the asthma attack. But just like the inhaler, the nebulizer didn't work. It felt like with every breath she was taking, her lungs were shrinking, not expanding. And so Jodi turned to her fiancé and croaked out, call an ambulance, her voice barely audible.

5:37And so her fiancé, who also was now beginning to panic, grabbed the phone, and as he was talking to the dispatcher, trying to relay all the details of what was happening, outside this thunderstorm was only getting worse and worse. The hail and the rain were battering the sides of the house, and all the windows were shaking. I mean, it was absolute bedlam inside of this house. The next few minutes were torture for Jodi. She laid on the bed waiting for paramedics. Her breasts at this point were so small, so shallow, like she knew she was about to pass out any second. And then finally, the paramedics rushed inside.

6:10She knew there were two people in the room, but it was so chaotic. And all she could say when they showed up in the room was, I'm going to die. I'm going to die. The paramedics lifted her off the bed. They put her on the gurney. and as they wheeled her out the door towards the ambulance, her world went totally black.

6:30The paramedics rushed Jodi to Sunshine Hospital, and on the way, they tried to stabilize her by squeezing these oxygen bags, forcing oxygen into Jodi's lungs. And as they were doing that, Jodi's fiance was following the ambulance right behind, white-knuckling the steering wheel, praying his fiance was going to survive this asthma attack. When the ambulance finally arrived at Sunshine Hospital, the emergency room was mayhem. Paramedics quickly wheeled Jodi in on her gurney, shouting out her vital signs to the doctors waiting near the door. Her fiancé, meanwhile, watched helplessly as the medical staff surrounded her and inserted IV lines, hooked up monitors, and began intubating her to force even more oxygen into her lungs.

7:13But fortunately, this rapid medical intervention once Jodi got to the hospital appeared to work. Because not long after getting there, Jodi did begin to stabilize, not enough to suggest that she was actually all better, but her condition basically began to improve. However, the moment she began to improve, instead of the medical team, you know, talking to her and figuring out what happened and making sure she really was on a path to recovery here, instead, the medical team literally ran out of her room back out to the front of the ER. Because by this point, the Sunshine Hospital ER was overflowing with patients.

7:50There were all these people in the waiting room and also outside, and basically everybody had the same symptoms as Jodi. They couldn't breathe. There were people slumped on the ground against the wall, screaming for help. I mean, the medical team was totally overwhelmed. And on top of that, there were ambulances literally lined up around the block waiting to drop off patients. There just wasn't any more space. But nonetheless, Nevertheless, doctors and nurses and the medical team at the hospital worked furiously moving from one patient to the next, sometimes in an exam room, sometimes out in the waiting room, sometimes outside.

8:23It's wherever the patients were. But the weird thing was, is all these people, they had the same symptoms, these severe asthma attacks, yet many of the people that were showing up had never had asthma in their lives before. So how was this happening? This went on for hours and hours. And really, the situation in the hospital only continued to get worse, with more and more and more patients showing up with worse and worse symptoms. And so during this madness, Jodi, who really hadn't gotten better, she just stabilized, she actually was moved out of the emergency room and over to the ICU pretty much just to create one more space for new patients.

9:02And so in the ICU, Jodi's fiancé sat next to her, gripping her hand, listening to the sound of the monitors beeping steadily all around her. Outside the room, he could see doctors and nurses and medical staff sprinting up and down the hallways, looking frantic and worried. He had no idea what was happening here. He just hoped Jody would be okay. But it would turn out there actually was someone who knew exactly what was going on. A university researcher named Philip Taylor had actually predicted this the day before. Professor Taylor was an expert in atmospheric allergens, a field so niche that barely anybody outside of his small research circle had even heard of it.

9:43And so on the afternoon of November 20th, the day before, Taylor had been at home in his office analyzing data when he noticed something very alarming. All of the ingredients for a catastrophic event were aligning in the forecast, and the patterns were so precise that it stopped him cold. Taylor was stunned. He'd spent years studying the effects of weather on public health, but he'd never seen anything like this before. And at the same time, Taylor also realized that as alarming as this was, very few other people, if anybody, would see this as a problem. He was like the one person in the world that had the expertise to see how catastrophic this might actually be.

10:26And so desperate to warn others, he wound up posting a very urgent announcement on this weather website that he managed, but unfortunately, it just wasn't seen by enough people in time. And so now, as hospitals all across Melbourne overflowed with people gasping for air, Taylor sat in his backyard watching the storm unfold. The sky was pitch black, rain and hail was coming down, the wind was whipping, and off in the distance, all he could hear was thunder and sirens. And he knew, unfortunately, his prediction had been right. Just like Professor Taylor's weather models had predicted, on November 21, 2016, Melbourne, Australia was hit by an extremely rare event known as thunderstorm asthma.

11:10This deadly phenomenon can only occur when three very specific weather conditions align. One, high heat during the day. Two, a very powerful thunderstorm. And three, extremely high pollen levels. Melbourne's heat that day had caused unusually high concentrations of ryegrass pollen to hang in the air. And then when that huge thunderstorm rolled in, the intense humidity, the wind, and the rain shattered the pollen grains into microscopic fragments. And then these tiny particles, which were way smaller than regular pollen, were carried by this storm deep into people's homes and into their lungs. Unlike normal pollen, these microscopic fragments bypassed the body's typical defenses and embedded themselves deep into people's lungs, causing severe and sudden asthma attacks.

12:01Now, for people who already had asthma, this was catastrophic. But even perfectly healthy people found themselves gasping for air, overwhelmed by the sheer density of this microscopic pollen. The storm had essentially made the air everybody in Melbourne was breathing deadly. As for Jodi Santoro, she would spend days in the ICU, hooked up to monitors, with machines pumping oxygen into her lungs while her body fought to heal. But she was lucky. She would eventually recover. And in the days that followed, she would learn the full scale of what actually happened in Melbourne. Nearly 10 ,000 people had flooded the hospitals across Australia, complaining of the same symptoms that Jodi did.

12:43And unfortunately, of those 10 ,000, 10 people actually lost their lives. and many of them were totally healthy and had never had an asthma attack in their lives before. For Jodi, despite surviving this ordeal, the awful memory of what happened on that night will forever be on her mind. She is now all too aware of how fragile life can be and how quickly things can change.

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15:59The next and final story is called All in Their Heads.

16:15On a sunny afternoon in the summer of 1953, a young woman named An stood in the middle of a huge sugar cane grove in an isolated forest in Papua New Guinea. And around her were all her relatives and neighbors, and they were all there to mourn the loss of An's sister, whose name was Tan. She had passed away three days earlier from a very mysterious illness that people in An's village called Kuru. And in their language, the word Kuru meant trembling. Now, keep in mind, this particular mystery illness that was called Kuru only affected the people in An and Tan's village. This is like a hyper-specific illness that only happened inside of this little forest to these people.

16:55But An and the rest of the people in her village had seen this happen over and over and over again every year, and so they knew what happened when you got Kuru, because it was always the same. As soon as you began to tremble, that was kind of like the first sign, one year or so after that moment, you lose control of all the muscles in your body until you die. And so in Tan's case, so An's sister, she had watched this happen exactly as it did for everybody else that ever got this illness. She started with the tremors, and then before long she couldn't even stand up or walk around, and then finally her sister lost control of the muscles in her throat, and so she couldn't eat despite being hungry, and so ultimately she died of starvation, which is like one of the worst ways to die.

17:37It's incredibly slow and very, very painful. And so ever since Tan's death three days earlier, the village had been performing all these rituals and prayers in an attempt to assist Tan's spirit on its way into the afterlife. And this type of very involved funeral was absolutely customary in Ahn's culture. Ahn and her family and all of these villagers were members of the Foray people who were native to Papua New Guinea, which is an island just north of Australia. And in 1953, when the story is taking place, the 4A people numbered about 11 ,000 people. And remember, they live in a very isolated forest.

18:14They are basically cut off from the world for the most part. But they were beginning to fear that they were going to go extinct because of Kuru. Every year, the 4A people lost 200 people to Kuru. And for the most part, the victims were women, like disproportionately so, which made it even more likely that the 4A people would go extinct. because if you lose all the women, you can't have any more kids. And in fact, by 1953, so many women had died from Kuru that by this point, there were three times as many men as there were women. In fact, the leading cause of death for 4A women was Kuru. But the 4A people did not view Kuru as just an illness.

18:54They actually viewed it as a curse. In fact, that was completely accepted that that is exactly what it was. This is not like getting the cold. somebody did this to you, like a sorcerer somewhere, some unnamed sorcerer that's like coming into the forest is targeting these women and cursing them with Kuru. And so the 4A people put on these really elaborate funerals, mostly to ward off these dark magic sorcerers that were casting Kuru spells. And so the 4A people believed that if they just nailed the funeral procedure for somebody who has just died from Kuru, the kind of three day long, all these rituals and prayers they have to do, if the village is able to nail it perfectly, then the deceased, who's passed away from Kuru, so in this case, on Sister Tan, her spirit, as a result of this perfect funeral, would be able to kind of rise up and actually seek revenge on the sorcerer who killed the person.

19:47And so these funerals were basically like kind of taking the dead, rising their spirit, and sending them off to go kill the sorcerer. And so, Ann and the rest of her villagers, they went through this very elaborate process for Ann's sister, Tan, and at the end of it, they did feel like they had really nailed it, and so they felt confident that Tan's spirit was going to rise up and get her revenge.

20:14A few weeks after Ann's sister's funeral, Ann was standing over an open fire, and she was cooking some pork and sweet potatoes, and as she went to flip the meat over, she reached her hand out and she noticed her hand was trembling, which is the first sign of someone with Kuru. Now, Ann told herself that, oh no, I don't have Kuru. It's just because I was working really hard today and I'm tired. Like, that's all it is. But she knew deep down she may have been cursed.

20:44Ann did her best to kind of hide her trembling hands. However, after about a month from that first time she noticed her hand shaking, she noticed she wasn't really able to stand up without kind of losing her balance because her legs were starting to tremble. And finally, when she basically couldn't even stand up without assistance, this is again only one month after that first tremble, she knew she had Kuru. And An already knew that there was absolutely nothing anybody in her village could do to stop this from killing her. Kuru was a 100 % death sentence. And so if you got Kuru, it's like the whole village just began prepping for your death because they had to be ready to do this big ritualistic funeral.

21:24And so imagine that. You have this mystery illness or curse or whatever you want to think it is, and you're just counting down the days until you die. But for Ann, even though she had seen this happen so many times before and just kind of knew there's nothing she could do, she couldn't stand the idea of having this horrible, slow, painful death. And so she decided, you know what? I'm going to do something drastic that basically nobody else had done before who had Kuru. So for context, at this time, the 4A people had been totally isolated from other people in the world for thousands of years. They basically lived in this little part of Papua New Guinea in the forest, and nobody else contacted them.

22:03They were totally isolated. However, starting in the 1950s, some Australian colonists and researchers and police actually began kind of making their way in and around the 4A people's area. So they were making contact, albeit not necessarily direct contact, but the 4A people were seeing basically white people wandering around in and around their forest from time to time. And it was always very shocking when they would see these people because they dressed completely differently, they looked totally different. I mean, it's like two worlds totally colliding. And generally speaking, Anne and the rest of the people in her village, they did not like having these Australian people kind of wandering around.

22:42But An is thinking, you know, the people in my village, the 4A people, they have no solutions for me. So maybe these Australian people that have kind of popped up, maybe they have some answers about what I can do to stop myself from dying from this horrible curse. Keep in mind, by going out and seeking help from these outsiders, it was like An would be breaking a huge custom. This is so taboo for the 4A people. and very likely, even if she was able to find a solution from these outsiders, it's not clear if she would have been welcomed back into her village. And so this is a truly desperate measure she's taking, but she really felt like she had no choice.

23:21So, even as her body trembled from Kuru, An managed to stand up using a stick, and she began kind of hobbling her way quietly and discreetly out of her village, something that she really never did. And eventually, after hobbling her way out of sight of the Foray people, She began making her way through the woods, and she eventually came to a clearing where there was this house. And it was obvious, this is not a house that the 4A people have built. This is somebody from the outside who's built something kind of near where they were living. And so Ann wandered up to this house, not really sure what to do, but she went up and knocked on the door.

23:56And a second later, it opened up. And it's this Australian anthropologist named Ronald Burnt, who actually Ann had seen before. He had been coming through her village a couple of times, attempting to interview people to learn more about the 4A people. She knew that nobody wanted to talk to him, but, you know, she had seen him before. And so she was relieved. This is someone that I'm somewhat familiar with. And so as Ronald is staring back at her, and Ronald's pretty tall and skinny, he's got glasses on, he's dressed like a typical Australian in the 1950s, and he's looking at Ann, and Ann begins to try to tell him what's going on with her.

24:29And as she began to talk, the words she was saying were coming out all garbled, and she realized that the Kuru curse was now affecting her throat, the muscles in her neck, and she was not able to speak. But as it happened, Ronald, who was very familiar with the 4A people, he could tell, based on just the way she was acting and how desperate she looked, that very likely this woman was here because she believed she had Kuru. And Ronald, who had learned about Kuru after studying the 4A people, he had done some research on it, and he believed it was entirely psychosomatic, that this was not an actual illness.