Weird Medicine: The Podcast - 480 - You'll Never Go Into the Woods Again

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

Charlie and Lindsey Killmaster tell us how nature is constantly trying to kill us. Mad Cow, Scrapie, Lyme, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Salmonella, Tularemia, Brucellosis...these are just a few of the things we can catch from the animal world. FUN! Please visit: stuff.doctorsteve.com (for all your online shopping needs!) Get Every Podcast on a Thumb Drive ($30 gets them all!) simplyherbals.net (for all your StressLess and FatigueReprieve needs!) BACKPAIN.DOCTORSTEVE.COM – (Back Pain? Check it out! Talk to your provider about it!) Cameo.com/weirdmedicine (Book your old pal right now while he’s still cheap!) feals.com/fluid (try the new FEALS MINTS!) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Who hides Easter eggs that you never want to find? The Dust Bunny If you just read the bio for Dr. Steve, host of weird medicine on Sirius XM103 and made popular by two really comedy shows, Opie and Anthony and Ron and Fez, you would have thought that this guy was a bit of, you know, a clown. Why can't

you give me the respect that I'm entitled to? I've got diphtheria crushing my esophagus. I've got subal of I'm stripping from my nose. I've got the leprosy of the heartbound, exacerbating

my incredible woes. I want to take my brain out and glassed with the wave, an ultrasonic, agographic, and a pulsating shave. I want a magic pill. All my ailments, the health equivalent of citizen cane. And if I don't get it now in the tablet, I think I'm doomed, then I'll have to go insane. I want to requiem for my disease. So I'm paging Dr. Steve.

Dr. Steve. From the world famous Carnif Electric Network Studios, it's weird medicine, the first and still only uncensored medical show in the history of broadcast radio. Now a podcast. I'm Dr. Steve with my little pal, Dr. Scott, the traditional Chinese medical practitioner, gives me street cred. the weird or alternative medicine assholes. Hello, Dr. Scott. Hey, Dux-T. And we also have Charlie and Lindsay Kilmaster, real

scientists in the studio. We'll be talking to them in a minute. Hello, Charlie and Lindsay. Thanks for having us. This is a show for people who would never listen to a medical show on the radio or the internet. If you have a question, you're embarrassed to take to your regular medical provider. If you can't find an answer anywhere else, give us a call at 347-7-66-4-3-23.

That's 347. Pooh-Hid. Or, I was going to Charlie on the spot, I decided not to do it. Follow us on Twitter at Weird Medicine or at D.R. Scott, W.M. Visit our website at Dr. Steve.com for podcast, medical news and stuff you can buy. Most importantly, we are not your medical providers. Take everything here with a grain of salt.

Don't ask anything you hear on this show without talking with your doctor, nurse practitioner, practical nurse, physician assistant, pharmacist, um, state deer inspector, I guess. microbiologist, chiropractor, acupunctrist, yoga master, physical therapists, clinical laboratory, scientist, registered dietitian, or whatever. All right, very good. Yeah, usually, Charlie, I'm a real asshole and I'll give out the number and then make you do the poo head. Nobody ever knows what the hell I'm talking about.

Now, you listen to the show, so you might have done it. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. Damn it, I should have done it. Yeah, I remember the other one too. Sorry. Oh, really? 22. Penis.

Very good. Okay, give you one of these. Uh-oh. Oh, well. Okay. Wait a minute. I think you deserve a full effect. Give yourself a bill. Thank you, O. There you go. Don't forget stuff.doctrsteve.com. S-T-U-F.f.com for all your shopping needs.

It's that time where the holidays are coming up. It takes you straight to Amazon, or you can scroll down and get some of the cool crap that's on there, including, I believe, the flattest flute. And listen, the fletus flute, I have. nothing to do with it. Even though it's got my picture on it and it says Dr. Steve, you know, loves the Flatis Flute or whatever,

I have nothing to do this, but I do find it to be hilarious. Now, their stupid website at fletusflute.com has an expired certificate. Let me just look and see if I visit

the website if it's still okay. Oh, boy. I got to check me. Come on. Okay, so I got to talk to Dan. about that. We'll try to get that fixed before the end of the week. I'll just let him know but I can't get through to it.

But it's fletus flute.com. It's a whistling butt plug. It's hilarious. No one actually should use it, but it's a great one of those gifts that you put in your, if you've got one of those white elephant or weird Santa gift exchanges. It's just

so stupid. And I did this at Tacey's friends. I'm sorry Tacey wasn't here to meet you guys. would really like you. But she had these friends. They were all like octogenarians. The youngest one, I think, was like 73. And so they're even old by my standards.

And we had this Christmas party. And I brought a bunch of fletus flutes and stuck them on their stock. He's like, what the hell is? So it's pretty funny. So it's good for stuff like that. And it's got a picture of me, a sort of a renin-stimpy type rendition of me and a hairy ass farting out musical notes right into my face

and I'm grinning like it smells like flowers it's the greatest thing ever and our buddy son of Chris did the artwork and he's also a genius so anyway check them out we'll try to get him to get his website working again

and so there's stuff dot Dr. Steve.com Dr. Scott's website at simplyerbils.net that's simply herbals.net and check out our Patreon we're doing stuff that you will not hear anywhere else. It's only on Patreon.

We've got classic shows that cannot be gotten on the internet anymore that going way back to day one, like October 13th of 2005, on Sirius, you know, around the time of the Sirius XM days.

And P.A. John and I did some podcast back then that really nobody ever heard. So they're out there. And then we're also, Tacey and I are the return of Tacey. Yay. So Tacey can't do this show, but she can do that because she can drink on Saturday and do we do three shows. So by the third one, she's three sheets to the win.

So every third show is a drunk show. And so it's Tacey and me, and we'll have some guests. We've got some surprise celebrity guests that are coming on that are people that aren't the usual suspect. So that's going to be lots of fun. And we've got real low tiers. just go to patreon.com slash weird medicine and check it out. And don't forget Dr. Scott's website at simplyerbils.net. That's simplyerbils.net.

Do you have anything up there? Nope. Okay. But it works. All right. You're working on. I hit the wrong one. Oh, I like that a little better.

All right. So in the studio today, we have real scientists, Lindsay and Charlie Kilmaster. Now, Lindsay, this shows what you can do with a master's degree. She worked for the CDC Tick Lab. She was on the IMCDC series, and she's done avian flu research. That's right. And Charlie is a deer biologist. I mean, who cares?

But anyway, yeah, boy, you're batting out of your league, Charlie. Lindsay seems to be the one with the bona fides here today. Oh, yeah, and she makes more money, too. Good, that's not the wrong with that. Yeah, no, joint checking account. I've just, excellent. Yeah, I've been on the other end of that before, and it didn't work out so well for me. So hopefully that'll work for you guys.

But actually, I'm shitting on Charlie. He really has a cool job. He's a deer biologist for, can I say, for the state of Georgia, and we're going to be talking about tick-related illnesses because they both. Now, did you guys, you both had interest in Rickettsial and tick-related illnesses, or this happened as part of your careers, or how did that intersect? That's Lindsay's wheelhouse. Yeah. Oh, but you're a deer biologist.

You've got to know something about it. Well, yeah, they're part of the life cycle. We both took the same wildlife disease course, a 10-credit-hour course back in graduate school, and so that's kind of where we were first. So I'm involved in it, but when it comes to the nuts and bolts of the diseases, she's definitely the expert. When I was doing my master's research, I did work with sandflies, and so I had worked with bugs and wildlife and in the lab.

So they let me work with ticks. Sandflies, you're talking about like when you're at the beach and these things take a big chunk out of you? No, these are the ones with like leash mania down in Central America. Oh. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in this world that we don't have here that we're awfully lucky we don't have. That's, yes.

I mean, good Lord. Parasites. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So we're going to talk about all that stuff. Did you guys hear the show on zoonotic metastases when we had PA, PA Lydia in? Yes, I'll listen to it.

I didn't. Okay, so you guys will be interested in this because these two have an interest in zoonotic disease. So these are diseases that humans can get from animals. And this person had a tapeworm, and the tapeworm had tapeworm cancer, and somehow the tapeworm cancer cells. They weren't human cells. They were tapeworm cancer cells, got into this person's body and metastasized. So they had a cross-species cancer, a malignant metastasis. That's the wildest thing I've ever.

Yeah. So for people who don't understand the jargon I'm using, and metastas just means it spread all over their body. But it wasn't their cells. It was the tapeworms cancer. It was the craziest thing. I never heard anything like that. You don't think about wild animals getting cancer.

They do. But, you know, a lot of times they just don't live long enough for it to be really much of an issue, but I guess a tapeworm living inside a human. It's a stupid, big, long bag of DNA that just eats your shit and reproduces it's disgusting.

And what is the purpose of those things? People used to use them to lose weight. They did. Yeah, they would eat the spores or whatever, the eggs or whatever, yeah. That's not a smart way to lose weight. A crappy byproduct of evolution.

Yeah. Really. Yes, exactly. Well, you know, there's a niche for everything. You get a drop of water from a pond, and there's all kinds of crap in there that we don't know anything about, and they're just living their lives, such as they are. Yeah, that can actually look for a lot of wildlife species and fish species, rare species, and river systems just by looking at running PCR on the water and picking up fragments of scales and all kinds of stuff. Polymerase chain reaction on water looking for DNA of things that are, they didn't know that were there. Or they think are rare or may not exist in a river system anymore. Wow. Yeah, it's cool stuff. That's cool.

You can also pick up traces of drugs in water systems, too, runoff from sewage systems. There will be, you know, minute amounts of oxycodone and statin drugs and Alprazis. a lamb, you know, Xanax, stuff like that in there. So, I mean, there's this invisible world around us. And then there's all my ham radio stuff, just the radio waves that were just bathed in all the time. And gamma rays from galaxies, billions of light years away that are just, you know, penetrating our bodies, neutrinos from the center of the sun.

It's crazy. Yeah. I don't know how we got off on that. It's probably the edible I did before you guys got here. Just kidding, everybody. sounds like it, though. So, well, let's talk about some stuff. So, number one, before the show, you guys were saying that you definitely know that COVID was made in a lab.

So let's talk about that. Just kidding. Just kidding. They did not say that. But you guys have some knowledge about this. What do you think? About the origins of it. And you don't have to commit to anything.

We all know. Nobody knows. Nobody knows. But, I mean, either way, it's going to have to be a perfect storm, right? So for a pandemic, you have to have the perfect storm of everything coming together. Same kind of goes for a lab leak. I've worked in BSL3 labs. Tell people what that means.

So biosafety level three, there's four different biosafety levels. They get stricter as you go up. So biosafety level three, things like influenza, things that are aerosolized. Four would be Ebola. I mean, those are the people. Things that we don't have treatments for, things that are fatal, Ebola, they still work with smallpox and B.S.L.4, I believe, if do you read the book, The Hot Zone? That guy's working in the lab and he's just working

away and these guys show up in these DSL4, you know, suits. And he's like, what the hell? Am I supposed to be here? I mean, I've seen people work in those labs and I've seen people not do things correctly. So, you know, is it beyond the realm of possibility that it came out of Lab. Well, people do stupid stuff. Most likely. I mean, I've seen the stand. That guy took off.

He got scared and he took off and went right through the gates. Right. That's fact, right? The stand, Stephen King's a stand. I mean, that's how these kinds of things happen, though. I mean, Michael Crichton in the Andromeda Strain talked about confluence of just stupid events that can cause something catastrophic to happen. Right. You talked about that in Jurassic Park, too, which was really the crux of that book wasn't about dinosaurs.

It was about how life will find a way if it's given a chance. But anyway, go ahead. Yeah, so I'm getting all excited, you can tell them. This is fascinating. There were some, you know, all these DNA sequences. We haven't been able to find an intermediate host, you know, where they think it went from bats to something else to humans. So could it have gone from? That was the hypothesis.

that it was this wet market, and it was a bat bit, a sivet, was it that what they thought it was? There was some pangolin. Panglans. They were looking at pangolins. Panglans. But then they haven't found any that have COVID. No. And these markets, they're a great breeding ground for stuff like this.

You bring in wildlife, you bring in domestic species, you bring in humans, everything just mixes together. And then outpots something. But what they're saying is it was going around way before that wet market. But, you know, most likely a scenario, these things pop up all the time. Yeah. Naturally. Yeah. Yeah, I've read a couple articles.

I've got a friend who is a vaccinologist at Mayo, and I had read some of the things that he had said. I've been trying to get him on the show, but he's been, you can imagine how busy he is. And he has really looked at the DNA sequence or the RNA sequence. So it's very unlikely this was manufactured because it mutated in a way that a human who was trying to manufacture it wouldn't think to do it. Right. So nature is crazy that way. There's markers that you can find and it's not showing any markers that it. Yeah, if they had coded a serial number in there or something that we would know.

Perfect, right. But, yeah, they weren't seeing that, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't have been enhanced in the lab. and, you know, something happened. Or, you know, somebody just, they were working at the wrong safety level. Yeah. Got sick and, you know, it's mild. Do you think it's a cold? And then the crazy quinky dink that the virology lab just happens to be right there at the night.

I still, I still think. Maybe it is a quanky dink. The natural, you know, it came about naturally. Yeah. But, you know, I'm not discounting lab leak at all. I don't think we'll have. will ever find out. Even if all the scientists in there came out and said, yeah, we did it, I think that there will be, it'll be suspect at that point. Nobody, nobody believes anything

anymore. No. That's for sure. Yeah, we just don't believe anything. So 20 scientists come out of that lab and say, yep, it was us. There's going to be a whole bunch of people going to say, there's no way that's possible. You wouldn't believe the number of people that came to Lindsay because of her being a scientist and being able to interpret the science. I mean, she was just like the go-to for all of our friends. Sure. When I couldn't trust or know what to believe from the media. Right.

Yeah, likewise. So, yeah, so let's talk about some of this stuff. We're all tired of talking about stupid COVID. We've got Molnapiravir coming out. We've got early remdesivir. I mean, how irritating is it that all they did was focus on the critically ill instead of focusing on keeping people from getting critically ill. That's the thing that pisses me off about this.

I'm still mad about it, but at least they're finally focusing on that. Oh, what a surprise. You give people on the ventilator with, you know, blood pressure of 60 over nothing, and, you know, you give them remdesivir, they don't get better. But you give it to them before they get sick, and miracle, 90% or 80-some percent of people, or I'm sorry, 80% reduction in people going to the hospital. I mean, and we're just doing this now?

We've been wondering the same thing this whole time. Oh, they were so focused on... Where are the treatments versus a vaccine? Right, thank you. Well, and you listen to the show, so you know I've been bitching about it for the longest time. And I used to do COVID situation reports on YouTube and said the same thing. You know, if we have a therapeutic that will keep people out of the hospital, the whole reason we're doing this is to keep from overwhelming the hospital system and to prevent people

from dying, well, then it's over. Vaccine or no? I mean, the vaccine will help, but we found that this thing's going to be endemic. I had the vaccine. I had a breakthrough case. I had a breakthrough case. I had a breakthrough case. Both fully vaccinated with what vaccine?

Pfizer. There you go. Same here. But we, you know, we breeze through it. Pfizer's strong, man. Yeah, but our daughter's got it and they were too young to get the vaccine. and our oldest had a rough time. She ran a fever for like nine days straight.

We were in the emergency room. And thank God Charlie and I were both on our feet the whole time. Yeah. Yeah. Infected with COVID, running back and forth to the ER, but what are you supposed to do? Yeah. Yeah. But that, I mean, that was, you know, the problem with the vaccine, it's hard to get people to, you know, they can be real skeptical of a vaccine.

But when they're sick with the disease, even if it's experimental, I think they're way more likely to go ahead get a treatment once they're sick. Oh, yeah, we've seen pretty good acceptance for the monoclonal antibodies. The problem with the monoclonal antibody is still, to this day, only 30% of people who should get it are being referred for it. I had one of my partners, I've told this story too many times, but she's half my age. She's still effed up two months later, and she was a candidate for it, but her primary care didn't think about it until it was too late. We haven't heard much about it. I mean, you hear here and there, there were some places in Athens that were giving it out.

But it's free. I mean, it's free to the user. Not, you know, being referred. We'll have monoclonal antibodies. So for the people who are at risk, for everybody else, they can take Molinopirivir as soon as it gets approved, what's going to be very soon. Pfizer's got one that looks even better. And then we've got an early remdesivir. So I think we've, now we've got all of a sudden four things that we know actually work.

Whatever happened with dexamethazin? Oh, that's great. They use it. And it does help. It even helps with the critically ill. It's one of the few things that we've used. And there are other things that we have. There's a couple of very powerful anti-inflammatory agents other than dexamethis,

So they're non-steroidal, but they aren't steroids that are powerful, any inflammatory agents. And they have shown some benefit in people with severe disease. But you still see all these folks in there that get the dexomethoseone, get remdesivir, get some of these other medications, and they're still not doing great, you know. So the key is to prevent them from getting there. And I was just pissed from day one that they were focused on the vaccine and the severely ill rather than focusing on therapeutics. Do it all. I mean, we're going to spend billions of dollars. What's another $500 million to work on a therapeutic?

But now we're there. So I guess better than ever, Jesus. And I said we weren't going to talk about COVID. And he got me all mad again. So, yeah, let's talk about some things. So there's a bunch of zoonotic diseases that people should know about. And we're going to talk in a minute about this alpha-gal syndrome, which is fascinating to me. And then people are interested in Lyme because our good buddy, you know, Greg Hughes,

the actor that plays Opie on the Opie and Anthony show, and Opie Radio podcast, had a Lyme scare that he talked about. I'm not talking out of school. He talked about it on his show a bunch. and what to tell our doctors when we get bit and, you know, our health care providers. But I also want to talk about rabies and prions before we get done. So a little tease for later on in the show. So let's talk a little bit. How about brucellosis?

Which of you is the expert on brucellosis? I think I can take that one. I deal with feral hogs quite a bit, and that's probably going to be one of the most common places people are going to get exposed to it. it. Yeah, so tell us about it. So, yeah, feral hogs are a plague on our natural environment in this country. Really? Yeah. Oh, my gosh. They're tasty, though, right? Yeah, well, they're pork, and they are feral. They're not, quote-unquote, wild hogs, or you raise from wild boar. They're a crossed-up genetic mutt of a pig. Oh, wait. Okay. So I'm assuming you're talking about wild boars. This is something different. Okay. So the wild boar that you're thinking of,

of is what we collectively refer to as feral pigs all across the U.S. Yeah, okay. So these are original descendants of Eurasian Boar, but they've been domesticated for like 9,000 years, and they were, they're all crossed up, and then they were released, you know, even by the Spanish, and the first explorations is when pigs first came here. Okay. But they far outbreed, even their native ancestor, not native, but their Eurasian wild boar ancestor. They can produce so many more young each year.

It's just unbelievable. They can outperform everything reproductively. Yeah. So like pigs, all the pig diseases we've eradicated from domestic swine, they're all still floating around. And you should pretty much assume that any feral pig, that you come across is likely to be positive for brucellosis. Okay.

And again, when you're saying feral pigs, that includes wild hogs? Wild hogs, feral pigs, one and the same. Oh, okay, okay, okay, okay. Yeah, okay. I thought you were making a distinction. So I've heard of feral cows in Florida. Have you heard about this,

that there's a bunch of cows like in the Everglades and stuff? Yes, yes. There's, we've actually got a small population on the island in Georgia of feral cows. So it's definitely not unheard of. Okay. You know, if they've got room to graze and they can keep them going.

So feral pigs are mean as hell, right? Oh, man. No? I get that all the time. You know, people... Well, they look mean. They were going to feed Hannibal Lecter to them. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, if you're in a pin with one, it's going to try to come after you. But if you're nine times out of ten, if you run across one in the woods, they're almost always going to run from you unless they're cornered. But I hear people that say they were charged by them and I think they just spooked the pig and the pig ran in their direction to get away.

I see. So, or maybe they had their babies with them or more. That's a pretty big assumption. Those sunbitches look mean, man. I'm telling you. Oh, they can hurt you big time. Can you feed them dead bodies and they'll just eat the whole thing? They will eat anything. They are highly omnivorous. And that's, you know, you know, so crazy. But yeah, they eat just about.

anything and that's what makes them so successful in the uh and nearly every environment you put them in yeah so so they have ripping teeth and grinding teeth yes uh and fighting teeth the tusks that grow on the boars uh and that they'll use those to dig up stuff too right right they do a lot of rooting if you find hog damage in the woods it looks like you plowed it up with a tractor yeah what are they going for grubs or they yeah they eat a lot of grubs they eat tubers they eat truffles they eat all constant like corn truffles and potatoes yeah and then they get into carmo fields and stuff yeah destroy them oh yeah like you can see especially right after they plant like peanuts or something you can they'll just walk right down the row

and just dig up the seed peanuts that's hilarious i've got a buddy they like all the same stuff we do yeah exactly i've got a buddy of mine he was telling me the the human flesh well unless you're really hungry yeah long pork exactly Right. Got a buddy of mine that he's got a huge population of these wild pigs up in Southwest Virginia. And he lives right on the river and it's a great farmland. And those things he said are just robust and wilder and help. But he goes, they're a whole lot smarter and give them credit for him.

And he says like they've got one farmer there that had this big huge mess of corn. And the pigs ate the center of the corn outside. But when you're looking at the cornfield from the side, it looks like it's normal. And you go inside, it's like, those sons of babies. Yeah, they're actually using drones to fly over cornfields to look for hog damage like that. Yeah, man, it's unbelievable. Really? Yeah.

Because they won't nibble around the edges. Well, they will some, but they feel more comfortable if they're inside that cornfield. Oh, sure. And they've got covered. But they're as smart as most dogs. They're unbelievably smart. And we've had to devise, like, it's fair. advanced technology to trap them.

You know, we use remotely triggered traps, so you're like a ring camera, it shines on the, and once you see, make sure, count all the pigs and make sure the entire group's in the trap, and then you send it a signal to drop the door. Wow. Because if you leave one pig out. They'll get the rest of them out. Well, they learn. You educate it, and you'll never get that pig to ever set foot in the trap again.

They say about Red Snapper, too, that if you miss one, then the rest of them won't, won't. bite anymore. Oh, no. That's what I hear. I don't know if that could possibly be true, but they're big, you know, they're big fish. Hell, funny. So, brusillosis. Yeah, so.

Causes fever, sweats, malays, in other words, just feeling crappy. So far, sounds like another thing that we all three of us had. Anorexia, in other words, loss of appetite, headache, pain in your muscles. How the hell do you know you have something like this? Well, handling pigs, that's the main thing. So you've got a long, a potential incubation period. You might get symptoms in one to two weeks on average, but it could be months after exposure. So the main thing is if you're handling a pig, wear gloves and don't rub your eyes when you're, don't eat, don't smoke or chew while you're cleaning one.

Oh, my God. Why wouldn't anybody do that, but I guess they do? And then if you get any sort of symptoms just knowing to tell your doctor that you've been exposed to, it. Because if the doctor doesn't know you've been handling feral pigs, they may not know to test you for these symptoms that are common across a lot of other diseases. So

I actually worked with CDC a number years ago to film some stuff and we interviewed a hog hunter that had gotten brucellosis. And I actually, here's one of the things I run into a lot is the last feral pig that I shot, I

cut myself in the process of cleaning it. So, if If it had it, I'm going to get it. I went to my doctor, let him know that. And so he was able to give me on prophylactic antibiotics. And I said, well, should I just wait? And he said, well, you can take two weeks of doxy now or wait until you got symptoms, and then you might be on it for six months.

Right. So that's a good thing to know. So the treatment's doxycycline, very inexpensive, easily obtained drug, requires a doctor's prescription in the United States. Yeah. So just knowing that you've been. I shouldn't say doctor. I know better than to say that.

Sorry. No, that's my phone. But just knowing that you've been potentially exposed to it and coming in direct contact with fluids of a feral pig, either in your eyes or a cut or something like that, I would consider that contact. Yeah. So it's not just, I'm sorry, it's not just skin. I mean, it could be any kind of fluid feces, urine. Mainly around the reproductive organs. It's venereal disease and hogs.

So it's transmitted. No wonder those things like hanging out in this part of the world, you know, makes me think, it wasn't very nice to say. What? I said, no wonder they'd like to hang out in this part of the world. It makes me think of one of our favorite movies. What? Don't be cryptic.

It's a radio show. Deliverance, yes. Oh, boy. Well, it's a venereal disease. Well, that's because you're an idiot. Well, at least we know we're not to stick our hands. Yeah. Yeah, that's true.

That's true. Now, I, so I know people that still hunt rabbits and stuff. Mm-hmm. And I watch that show alone. And a woman Callie came really close to winning, the 100-day challenge. By the way, if anybody doesn't watch this show, you need to give it a try. It is an amazing show.

It's phenomenal. They put people in the middle of nowhere right before winter with nothing, and they have to do everything. They can bring 10 items. And this guy, Roland, well, I don't want to give a spoiler, but there's some really phenomenal people out there. And some, the one guy I liked was the big fat guy that won just because he was fat. He didn't do anything.

No, he just sat there until everybody tapped out. You remember that guy? I don't want to say his name because it's kind of. of insulting, but that's why he won. But anyway, this Cali had gotten a porcupine, and

when she was cleaning it, the liver had all these white sort of, it looked like little micro-accesses. I saw that, yeah. You did? Yeah, that was wild. Yeah. She was trying to decide she should boil it out. And she was like, should I eat it? And so talk to us about that, because there is a myth, and I don't know if it's a myth,

that you shouldn't clean rabbits during the summer because you'll get rabbit fever, which is tularemia. Yeah, I hear that a lot, too. I think it is more common in the summer, but don't quote me on that, that particular thing. It's not hard and fast. Yeah, it's always a good idea to wear gloves when you're handling rabbits because of the potential for tularemia. But when you're gut and animal, if you look at the liver and the spleen, if it's got those white, spots at that point. If you've come into contact with the body, you may want to consider

talking to the doctor about potential exposure to tularemia. And it's, you know, it's a nasty disease. It doesn't have to get into a cut. It can just go right onto your skin and start infecting you. And it's also one that, you know, they're concerned about terrorism. Terrorism, yeah. Can aerosolize. So a lot of people get tularemia from like mowing over. rabbit carcasses. Oh, oh my goodness. Yeah. And it, oh, my goodness.

It causes into the air. No, don't get, yes. Don't tell us. Hey, look on CDC's website. Oh, hey, oh, hell no. That's terrible advice. And then the summer thing could be linked to ticks, too, because you can, it's a tick-borne disease as well.

Yeah, and deer flies. Anytime you're cleaning. Skin contact with infected animals. Mm-hmm. Inhaling contaminated aerosols are agriculture and landscaping dust. Oh, my God. It's a lot of landscapes. This world is just stacked against us, and it's weird that we just go through our lives, just thinking, well, okay, I'm going to watch Seinfeld tonight.

Yeah. And then you know your lawn and you have Tillerimia. And your lungs, no doubt. Is that everywhere, is it more Tularemia in North America, South America? Africa? All states except Hawaii. All states. That's what it says here.

Yeah. Yeah. Steps, okay, here you go. Steps to prevent tularemia. Use insect repellent. Wear gloves when handling sick or dead animals and avoid mowing over dead animals. Yeah, okay. I don't do it on purpose.

Yeah. I mean, if you got a dried up jerky rabbit that's laying out in the lawn and you don't notice it because it's kind of covered up in tall grass. I mean, that's easy to move over. Yeah. Easy. Oh, no, this is one of these. I hated these things in medical school.

I know I memorized this at one point. All forms are accompanied by fever. It can be as high as 104. And in the middle of a, you know, a global pandemic, people are going to just assume that that's what they have. But here's all these different kinds. Do you know them? Ulcero glandular and glandular.

No, that's okay. So I'll run through these. Ulcero glandular, most common form of tularemia, followed by a tick or deerfly bite or after handling an infected animal skin ulcer appears at the site where the bacteria entered the body that sounds like a shanker.

The ulcer is accompanied by swelling of regional lymph glands usually in the armpit or groin. So a lot of people are going to think that they have cat scratch fever or something like that because that'll present sort of the same way. And then there's glandular,

oculanglangular, I guess that's when you stick your finger in your eye. Oropharyngeal, that would be from eating or drinking I'm guessing, yes. And then pneumonic, the most serious form, cough, chest pain, difficulty breathing from breathing dusts or aerosols. God, this sucks. Yeah, it really does.

And didn't you find a, Lindsay, didn't you find a publication that showed that probably 50% or more of cases are tick-borne? What? It is a tick-borne disease. And so, like, as you're cleaning animals, like when these animals die, the ticks drink blood. Got nowhere to go? They detach. You know, they go looking for another meal. And so you're the closest warm-blooded thing to them.

And, I mean, they'll feed on reptiles too. But, yeah, so they'll start crawling on you and touch. Fucking ticks. And what about when they, can they, like, going from a nymph to an adult, can they still keep those diseases and transmit them through that metamorphosis? With tularemia, I would have to look that up. I can't remember. So there are some diseases that go from, so most of them will go through the different life stages.

So with ticks, you have the larvae, which are the really teeny tiny ones that most people will call seed ticks. You know, so they'll hang out in a big ball of like 5,000 on a piece of grass and you swipe by them. That's good eating. You know, you get hundreds on you. And then there's nymphs and adults. And so, you know, if they feed on something at any of those stages, as an adult, they can have that disease. Now, when they lay eggs, some of the diseases will go into the eggs and some of them won't. It just depends.

Wow. That's disgusting. That's pretty gross. Yeah. Okay, so it says tularemia can be difficult to diagnose. It's a rare disease. I can confirm that I've never seen a single case of it in my career, at least not that I recognize. And so if you get something, it's really important that you talk to your health care providers, say, I've been exposed to this animal or that animal.

and don't forget about that. But the good news, doxycycline is treatment of choice. So another, why don't we just throw doxycycline on everything? Yeah, really. If you're talking about tick-borne stuff. It's just about right, right? I mean, like, all those things. Yeah, doxy.

Good. Take that. All right. That's pretty wild. So what about, no, I was just going to say, what about like alligators and. Oh, Salmonella and stuff, yeah, in South Georgia, Florida and... Well, Ms. Lindsay here and myself, we both killed alligators in Georgia.

Oh, God. So we... That's freak up, man. Oh, no, it's cool. But no, we have a hunting season, and you have to apply for tags and all that stuff. Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

I've never heard of such a thing. Yeah, so generally, like, if they've got Salmonella all over the outside of their body, so they I really recommend before you got a skin one, you scrub the outside of the alligator with a mild bleach solution to clean the skin before you cut into it and potentially infect the meat. Really? Yeah. Alligator meat's excellent. Only bad thing is it's a source of bioaccumulation of mercury.

They're big, large carnivores that live in the water and eat a lot of fish. So just like big predatory fish, they can bioaccumulate mercury as well. It would be nice if you could just take the meat that you get and have it tested before you go fry it up. Well, we did a lot of testing in the early days when we first started hunting alligators again after we recovered them from an endangered status. And you can assume that the bigger the alligator, the more they bio-accumulated mercury. And so we recommend that pregnant women don't eat a lot of alligator at all. or, you know, children, no more than so many meals per week. We have actual specific recommendations on how many meals per week and that sort of thing.

Who's eating an alligator five times a week? I mean, I lived in Louisiana. I didn't know anybody eating gator that often. Well, if you go hunting and you kill a big alligator and you got 30 pounds of alligator be eating your freezer. Fair enough. Yeah, sure. Make your alligator stew. Make alligator tacos.

Yep. Fried alligator's best. That's about it. How about, okay, so I want to get to Lyme. We've still got, oh, we've got some time level. Let's talk about alpha-gal syndrome. We want to talk about that. You can pick it off, Lindsay?

Should the alpha gal talk about that? Yes. She is the alpha-gall. I don't know about that. But, yeah, so it's an allergy to red meat that you can get after you've been bitten by a tick. That's the nudiest thing in the world. So ticks have this, and it's a carbohydrate. So most allergies are from proteins.

This one's from carbohydrates, it's sugar. And so that's why it's got a delayed reaction, which is what's kind of really weird about it and makes it kind of hard to diagnose sometimes. But you can get it from a tick bite. You can get it from, they initially discovered it from, like, cancer medications. And the people that were getting cancer treatments, that were having this red meat allergy kind of overlaid here in the South with tick distributions.

So this one doctor was seeing a lot of it, and he kind of put two and two together. Then at the time, it was kind of really weird, his technician or somebody in his lab. I could be telling the story completely wrong. But had gotten bitten by a tick and then ended up with this allergy, and they kind of put it all together. It's a serendipity there. But, yeah, so you can't eat beef, pork. People have trouble with heart valves, knee replacements from, you know, any pork products. Oh, yeah.

They can reject it. Heart valves have alpha galactosidase in them, and your body basically just attacks it, right? And it's mostly, you see it mostly from organ meat or from fattier meats. So leaner cuts can not give you the same reaction, but the reactions from different people are really varied. So Charlie actually, we wonder if he has a mild form of it. So some people can be really bald. Some people can be severe.

Some people can take Zyrtec and eat meat. Yeah. I notice it, so we, being a hunter myself, we pretty much live off of venison in our household. And venison doesn't bother me at all. And I think it's probably related to the low, fat content. But if I, like, if I'm on the road and I eat like fast food burgers like twice and one day, I'm going to wake up either in the middle of the night or the next morning with

hives. So the hives show up three to seven hours later. That's so weird. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, this thing can cause hives, itching, swelling, abdominal pain, cramping, all that stuff. And the treatment for it is to lay off of the red meat for like six months, right? And then the the antibodies disappear because you're not continuing to regenerate them? I've had it for, well, I've been eating meat the whole time, but I've had it for over 15 years. Yeah. And my, some people, they lay off of it and it doesn't seem to go away, and some people it does. Mine has been kind of intermittent, and I went for a few years with no reactions, and I can't find any data on this, but I got a tick bite early.

summer and all of a sudden it shows back up that's interesting and so I don't know if it's back up again yeah but I get bitten by ticks relatively frequently because of my recreation and my job that puts me out in the woods a lot isn't that something I'm trying to find some what is it in the tick bite that causes this where you all of a sudden it's in the saliva sure but what is it it's the alpha galactic so it's there's alpha galactosidase and everything though you know well then it's it's it's So if your hypothesis was, and it may be, it may be the way you're exposed to it, but you would, every, all of us would be allergic to red meat because that's what the, you know. Who knows?

I mean, there are so many different factors in tick saliva. Yeah. There's stuff that helps evade the immune system. They've got an anesthetic so that, you know, once they bite you, you won't feel it. Right. They've got all sorts of stuff. I mean, the bacteria and ticks, the tick-borne diseases actually use the tick's saliva as a means to evade the immune system in some cases. So don't ask me to get too deep in there.

I'm going to find out, though, because now that's going to drive me crazy. Because for those listening who don't know what alpha galactosides is, it's a complex sugar that is in red meat. and you don't see it so much in chicken and fish. And so when people ingest this, they've got these antibodies against it, and then it's just mushing up into their, you know, it's being absorbed in their GI tract, into the bloodstream, and then it's bumping up against the GI tract, and you're forming these inflammatory complexes there.

And then, yeah, you get this bloating, the abdominal pain, and then ultimately the hives. And that's why it takes so long is because it's got the sugar's got to make it to the skin with these inflammatory complexes attached to it. And then now you've got this skin reaction. But that takes a while to diffuse out there. Yeah, I get real bad heartburn, like uncontrollable heartburn. You can take all the tums or any ameprosol in the world, and it's not going to touch it.

I got something for you that you might try, and this might help anybody else that has that. It has stomach stuff would be serum. bovine immunoglobulins. So it's called enteragam, and your doctor or health care provider can write it for you. It can only be gotten from one pharmaceutical company in the country, and then they call you, and you have to give them your credit card. But it's $99 for a box of 30 packets of this stuff, and it might last you months if you only use it every once in a while.

And those bovine serum antibodies will bind to a lot of these kinds of. of toxic complexes. I don't like to use the word toxins, but they will bind to those things in the GI tract to keep them from coming into contact with the GI tract. That might help that. Because you're right, the reason Tums don't work is because it's not acid, it's inflammation.

Yeah, luckily, since I figured it out, I figured out that just taking a Zyrtec can not my symptoms out. Isn't that interesting? It works really well with mine. But I've had a couple of family members or a family member and a friend that had this and got cured by acupuncture. So I'm thinking about trying that.

Wow. There you go, Dr. Scott. There you go. I actually offered. Stick it to tell him. I asked Dr. Scott to go ahead and treat him tomorrow, and he said he was too busy. Oh, too busy. I got shit to do, man.

Okay. You get nothing. You lose. Good day, sir. That's just Dr. Scott. He just didn't care. Yeah. So I'm going to bet.

I'm going to be Creskin now. And I'm going to take a, I will bet, I don't know, $25 that you do not have B blood type. I don't know what type of blood is. Well, good. I don't have to give you 25 bucks. But it says patients whose red blood cells, and this is from Medscape, who expressed the B antigen appear to be protected from alpha-gal allergy. and people with type B or AB have decreased risk and type O or A or A increased risk compared to that.

So kind of interesting. That is kind of crazy. Yep, yep. I've read something about blood type and was curious, but then I couldn't find it in any of my medical records. Well, we talk about these blood type diets and if they're BS and all this kind of stuff. And I don't know if they are and they aren't. I just haven't seen good data, real science done. on those blood type diets, but blood type is a determinant of a lot of different factors

in our health. And my wife, for example, is O negative, and I'm O positive. And so all our kids, she had to be vaccinated, basically, against my antibodies. She had to have blocking antibodies that would stop her body from making antibiotics. antibodies against the R.H. positive kid. And she would be exposed to their blood when the kids are born. And that's why Ann Belin lost her head. Did you know that? Because the R.H. She was a negative. She was a negative. And Henry was positive. And she had one kid. This is always the pattern. One kid. And then you have multiple losses, you know, terminations of pregnancy

after that. And so Queen Elizabeth, the first, and so she was in a way almost lucky that her mom had that because there weren't any sons that could take precedence over her because at the time they would have put them ahead of her. And

we would have never had the original Elizabethan era or any of that stuff. Shakespeare wouldn't have had his patron and, you know, who knows what would have happened in that alternate universe where Anne Boleyn has, was R.H. positive what would have happened you know but anyway how would history have been different but yeah so

that's just a fun factoid in history that uh that that if they had had rogam back then things would have been different but you know so my wife had the same thing anne malin did i did not have to execute her because she did was able to have other children and give me male air so whatever um all right so if we covered everything on alpha gal syndrome I believe so. Let's talk about Lyme disease real quick, because I know a lot of people, it used to be. We thought it was just in the Northeast when I was in Vermont. We sort of felt proprietary about it or proprietary about it that, oh, you know, this is our disease.

But now they've seen it in every state of the country that I'm aware of, at least on the continental U.S. Right. So tell us if you, how do we know we're at risk for Lyme disease and then what does it look like when we actually have it? Because a lot of people think they have Lyme disease that don't. Right. So, I mean, again, it's kind of these generalized, you know, symptoms, malaise. You know, you might get fever. Muscle aches.

There's a lot of muscle aches, joint aches, those types of things. And if you don't know if you've been bitten by a tick, then, you know, it's one of those things. It's really hard for doctors to diagnose. And so it was historically up north, but the ticks have moved down here. So we didn't have the ticks that transmit this disease, the black-legged tick, cody scapulars. We didn't have those in the south for a long time, but they've made their way down here. Damn, Yankees.

Now, it's still the ticks that we have down here, when they look at, you know, prevalence of lime in the ticks compared to up north, it's still way higher up north, about tenfold higher. I mean, you're still only looking at like 1% of ticks up north. and 0.1% of ticks down here. But, yeah, they think that down here those ticks are using reptiles in their younger stages in those larval and nymphal stages. And reptiles don't, are bad hosts for the Lyme spirochet.

Interesting. Yeah. I don't like it. So Lyme disease is interesting because it acts like syphilis in the sense that it has three phases. You have the rash in syphilis. You get a shanker and it divides and divides again. and then it goes away, and you think, oh, I'm fine. But the spirochete is going wacko in your central nervous system and stuff.

Lyme, same way. You get this bullseye-type rash, real lacy. I've seen it. I've treated a bunch of lime cases when I was up there. Lacey sort of rash that spreads out from the center of where the tick was. And then it kind of fades away. And if you don't treat them, it'll come back and they'll get tertiary Lyme disease because the secondary phase is latent and they just don't have any symptoms.

Right. And I mean, you can have it. it for life. Yep, yeah. Now with that, with that bullseye rash, that's what a lot of people look for, but actually less than half the cases

have that bull's-eye rash. Yeah. So if that's, you know, if you're looking for that as your indicator, you know, it could be missed. Right. So I get bit by a tick. Mm-hmm.

Now what do I do? So if you can keep your tick, you know, that's always a great thing. You know, if we can identify it, you've got a better chance of, of knowing what you might have. If you can put it in alcohol, that's even better. And then they can do the polymerase chain reaction

to see what the tick's carrying sometimes if the doctor submits it in time and it's not too degraded. They can check on that too. But yeah, you go to your doctor and you tell you, and it's what, six months of doxy or refampin? Or both. Okay, if you're confirmed, I know that the regular, the regular, just the regular treatment for suspected Lyme disease, I think it's just, it's 10 to 14 days.

Is it? Yeah, doxycycline, 100 milligram twice a day for 10 to 14 days. And that's if you have erythema migrans, the rash that we're talking about. Now, if you have tertiary Lyme disease, it's six months. Okay. Yeah, I think that might be what you're thinking about. If children get it 10 to 14 days, you can get neurologic Lyme disease, you can get Lyme disease of the heart, that sucks, and then you can get Lyme arthritis too. And I've had those people back in the day, they would get an IV medication called septriaxone, and they would get that for months and months and months and months.

So you don't want to screw around with this. No. But not every, you know, so you just said if you're in the South, you get a tick bite. If it's not on you for 24 hours, then the odds are very low, right? For Lyme? Yeah, for Lyme. Pretty low. So when they've actually gone in and looked at transmission rates, it varies.

And so you want to do your tick checks as soon as you get home. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, but the prevalence is. Even up north, the prevalence is that you said 0.1%, right? So you have a 99.9% chance of not having Lyme from that tick. It's 1% up north. And then it's 0.1% down here. Okay.

Holy crap. I don't know on average. You know, that's a few papers. I've been out of the tick world for a little bit. I have a lot of my clients who will call me and say, well, I just had sex with a prostitute. What are my odds? I'm worried I have HIV and then I walk them through. Well, here's the prevalence.

You've got to take the prevalence. What's the percentage of people that are just in the real world randos that have HIV? And then you have to multiply that times the chance that you'll get it in a single encounter with somebody with unprotected penis vagina intercourse. And the number is very low. And that number being very low, I can usually talk somebody off the cliff. you know but but the the odds aren't zero so I still tell them next time you know use a condom so what's your recommendation if you get bit by a tick and now the the place is turning a little

bit red and knowing that there's more out there than just Lyme disease what do you think people should do I mean go go talk to your doctor I'm going to say I don't know here's some doxycycline right I mean doxycycline treats a lot of tick-borne diseases and so you know whether you know if it's lime or Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, any of these other more obscure things, a lot of them are treated with doxycycline. That's the good news. And especially with, you know, some of these, with children, you want to go ahead and give the doxy. A lot of doctors are still kind of reluctant to give that doxycycline to children because

old formulations caused permanent tooth staining. Right. But that's not the case with the newer formulations anymore. So you want to make sure that if it's your child, that you go ahead and ask for that doxy. What the hell was in the old doxycy cycling that caused people's teeth to be brown? We had one of my classmates in medical school had that. I have no idea. The new stuff doesn't do it. New stuff doesn't do it.

I don't do that anymore. I haven't done it in a long time. I practice my specialty, so I haven't dealt with kids' illnesses. So that's good to know. With Lyme, it's not as important as like with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. One day difference in delaying that doxycycline can put a kid in the hospital. Wow. That's a shit disease.

It is. My brother had it when he was a kid. Did he? Yeah, living right down the street here. Really? Yep. Huh. Were they diagnosed it clinically?

Mm-hmm. They had to. They didn't have a test for it then. No, yeah. Clinically, we were running. There's some big pastors up here. and we used to play up in that pasture. And, yeah, he just got really sick one day and it's like, oh, God.

And he had Rocky Mountain Spotted Paper. He was sick as shit, too. Yeah, I bet. He's okay now, thankfully. Well, let's talk about the weirdest thing in the, quote-unquote, animal kingdom, the non-human kingdom. And that are prions. Which one of you is the expert on prions? She knows a lot about it, but I deal with it on a nearly day-to-day basis because of crime.

chronic wasting disease. So chronic wasting disease is a prion illness? Yes. It is specific to the deer family, the cervids. Not all of, well, not all of the deer species can get it, but most of them can, certainly all the ones that are native to North America. White-tailed deer, elk, mule deer, even moose can get it, caribou can get it. Is it transmissible to humans?

Yeah, so we don't think so, but we don't know so. That's the thing about it. It's similar enough to mad cow disease, which was the bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Right. That came from... Give yourself a bill. That came from feeding cows to cows. So cannibalism causes prion diseases like Kourou and humans.

Yeah, Kourou is a prion disease from eating human brains. Yes. And I met the guy that did the research in... It was a Borneo or Papua New Guinea? Yeah, Papua New Guinea, that's right. And I'm trying to remember his name, but I had lunch with him. In medical school, it was fascinating. You know, his research that he did.

And he was one of the guys that figured out, hey, quit eating brains, and you won't get this. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, the crazy thing is they weren't doing that. It wasn't like a long-term cultural thing. Yeah. It happened when, I think, only 50 years prior when the first Europeans were, or coming over and meeting indigenous tribes in Papua New Guinea and convinced them that they would retain the knowledge of their elders

that they ate the brains. Some Europeans told them that shit. Well, they gave the brains to the women and children. Well, yeah, it was consuming the whole bodies and they gave the crappy bits to the... Oh, God. So the women and children ended up with it more than the men did. Oh, my God.

That's horrendous. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about Priyons. Priyons are weird. They are weird. They may be a precursor to the life as we know it. There may be some of the oldest forms of something that can reproduce or cause other things to reproduce without being a virus, a bacteria, or a, you know, a eukaryote.

And it's the way that Johns Hopkins is describing is that their proteins that can trigger normal proteins to fold abnormally. But my understanding is that these stupid things, if they don't act like a catalyst, they can actually reproduce themselves. I don't know how much of that is true. Yeah, I'm not sure about that, but I know the triggering the folding of the similar preon proteins, the normal preon proteins that are occurring in the body.

And it's with this disease and deer, it is 100% fatal, but it's slow. It takes from the time they contract it and are exposed to it, it takes about 18 months before they really become sick and die from it. And so they slowly waste away towards the tail end of that. But it's, yeah, it's slowly creeping across the U.S. It kind of spreads fairly slow on its own, but through in and burden moving of live deer, through the captive deer industry, it's gotten moved around the state. It could have been some carcass transport stuff.

We know it can remain infective in the soil for years. Oh, geez. Yeah, these things you can't kill them. They're really hard to kill. They're heat stable, too. Yeah, it's crazy. Because you can cook stuff and still get it. Right.

So we have an incinerator that we do, but our incinerator doesn't get hot enough to totally denature it. So we have to make sure we properly dispose of the ashes just in case. Now, we haven't detected it in my state, but where we're sitting now in Tennessee does have it in western Tennessee. So we're keeping an eye on it. It's not. It takes a long time, and I'm talking decades before it really starts negatively impacting deer populations, but just that concern that it could make a jump to humans. So the prion itself is not produced. It's not like a virus, so it doesn't inculcate itself in the cell and then reproduce itself.

And it also doesn't sound like it reproduces either. I thought that it made more proteins fold like itself, but maybe it doesn't. it's just an indestructible toxin that acts like a catalyst then no it makes other proteins yes it like itself yeah so it just has to touch up against them yeah that's what it is and and you know with that contact you know we have normal pre-on proteins in our brain right this is the abnormal protein that abnormal protein touches up against another one and turns it into something like itself it create yep and creates these giant complexes and then holes in your brain and so this is a relatively new disease this disease

occurred in the 1960s in Colorado and it came out of a captive deer research facility at oh no

yeah here we go again so yeah and I don't know all the details but I know that they were doing

scrappy research in sheep at the same facility scrappy being a sheep prion disease um

Um, and I, you know, whether you're a conspiracy theorist or not, I am personal, my personal guess is that it very likely was a species jump from scrappy out of sheep and into mule deer. And, uh, but, oh my God, weirdly, reindeer and Norway have come down with this. And we know that there's not been live deer being moved from America over to Norway. But there's also a history of scrapies and sheep. And I, and my personal belief is that it also made a species jump in that overlap between not cat, we're talking herded mule, herded reindeer that are, and probably interspersed with sheep in that situation. Yeah, and they're being maybe fed, ground up things from. Yeah, that's a possibility too. I mean, we know cannibalism causes it. And I don't know about other countries here in the U.S. That's why they banned, you know, feeding bone meal to that same animal.

So now cows can get chicken bone meal, but not cow bone meal. But other countries, they may be able to still do that stuff. I don't know. God. But it's, you don't want it. I mean, you know, if any of the preon diseases, you know, there's spontaneous Kretzfeld-Jacob and humans. And there's the craziest one I've ever heard of is the fatal familial insomnia.

It's like the worst way to die. Yeah, this one family. I don't think that is the worst way to die. For me, because I've had insomnia, and it's... Oh, insomnia. Fatal familial and insomnia. Yeah, it only infects this one lineage of family. It's genetic.

Genetic. It's crazy. Yeah. So what it does is it affects the hippocampus, I think, in their brain. You might have to check me on that. I was just thinking the same thing. But it disrupts their ability to sleep. and so they start going longer and longer and longer without sleep

until their body eventually just shuts down. No drugs and make them sleep? No, nothing. What about Michael Jackson's magic milk? It's still... It still doesn't work, I guess. They go insane. Propothal or whatever that is.

Yeah, prophal. Yeah, it's crazy. Wow, and this is caused... I've already forgot what the hell we were talking about. You just blew my mind. We were talking about chronic wasting. disease. Oh, yeah, yeah.

But this is fatal, familial insomnia. And it's just this one family. Oh, it's just the one family. Okay. Italy. Yeah. Yeah, it's not transmissible. If you eat their brains, I wonder if you could get it.

Oh, yeah. That's a good question. Yeah. Yeah. Who's going to do that double-blind placebo-controlled studies? Wow. It may initially be mild progressively worsens leading to significant physical and mental deterioration.

Effective individuals may develop dysfunction of auto-neutral. nervous system. Yeah, and that's, you know, involuntary stuff. Body temperature regulation, sweating, breathing. Whoa, I don't know what that was. Holy moly. Yep, caused by an abnormal variant of the PRNP gene. Holy crap.

Oh, that's horrible. Now, that, I've never heard of that. So I'm going to, you guys are going to get a $25 gift card so we can buy your dinner tonight as long as you eat it fast food on the way home. There you go, Lindsay. And then I've got two weird medicine mugs

for you downstairs, too. Don't let me forget to give those. Just don't need you a cheeseburger there. Yeah, no cheeseburgers for Charlie. I just pop a ZerTec and I'm good. Okay, okay, wow. Wow, that's wild. And then they're thinking frontotemporal dementia

may be somehow related to this. That's crazy. To what? To this prion disease that they're talking about. This fatal familial insomnia. Plus, that's horrible. That's the worst thing I've ever heard of. Yeah, there's a great book that Lindsay and I both read called The Family That Couldn't Sleep.

Yeah. And it covers all the prion diseases and both animals and humans. Well, that'd be a good one. Yeah, it's a great read. For mental illness, my favorite book is The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. so check that one out that's a good one both of those

sound like good reads well listen we had prepared all this stuff because I told Scott you know maybe they'll be boring and so we have to have all this other stuff

to keep up with this was awesome I went by so fast we have to have you back yeah we'd love to come back yeah anytime you're welcome anytime there's a lot of stuff we don't ever ever talk about

pretty fabulous stuff yeah it was great don't bring it with you yeah we need to hose these two off before they come in the door. Really? I did bring you some deer mate, Dr. Steeve. After you're telling me about prion disease, I don't think so.

Thank you. They're clean. Clean deer. Clean Georgia deer. Uh-huh. Well, thanks for coming. You guys are awesome. Charlie and Lindsay Kilmaster, two real scientists in here,

making us both look kind of dumb in comparison to these brilliant geniuses. So thank you for being here. We can't forget Rob Sprantz, Bob Kelly, Greg Hughes, Anthony Coomia, Jim Norton, Travis Teft, that Gould Girl, Lewis Johnson, Paul Ophcharsky, Chowdy 1008, Eric Nagel, the Pork Charlotte Horror, Lindsay, the Saratoga Skank and the Florida Flusi, all our listeners to this show. Roland Campo, sister of Chris Sam Roberts, she who owns pigs and snakes. This stupid list has just got longer and longer. This is what happens with 17 years of doing this. Pat Duffy, Dennis Falcone, Matt Kleinschmidt, Dale Dudley, Holly from the Gulf. And if I don't do it, people are like, well, where's my shout-out?

Christopher Watkins, double, aka Steve Tucci, the great Rob Bartlett, Vicks, Netherfluids, Cardiff and Electric, Casey's wet T-shirt, Carl's deviated septum, the inimitable Vincent Paulino, Eric Zitunian, aka Eric Zane, Bernie and Sid, Martha from Arkansas's daughter, Ron Bennington, and, of course, our dear departed friend, Fez Wattley, who will never be forgotten. All of these who's supported this show has never gone unappreciated. Listen to our SiriusXM show on the Faction Talk channel. Serious XM Channel 103, Saturdays at 7 p.m. Eastern,

Sunday at 6 p.m. Eastern on-demand and other times at Jim McClure's pleasure. Many thanks to our listeners whose voicemail and topic ideas make this job very easy. Shut up. I'll echo or whatever your name is. Go to our website at Dr.steve.com for schedules and podcasts. the crap. Until next time, check your stupid nuts for lumps, quit smoking, get off your asses and get some exercise. We'll see you in one week for the next edition of weird medicine. Thank you all.

Thank you.