MAGAZINE AND NEWSPAPER ARTICLES

Medical Curiosities

There are thousands of fascinating medical facts and curiosities that people really didn’t know that they wanted to know until they knew them!

Everyone finds these curiosities fascinating. They can be used as column fillers, teasers, collections or combined into a longer article.

Medwords has hundreds of these intriguing facts in its database.

Examples of medical curiosities gleaned by Medwords include:-

MEDICAL CURIOSITIES

Over 60% of human genes are identical to those in a fly, and 90% are the same as those in a mouse.

The more a man thinks about sex, the faster his beard grows. Thinking about sex increases testosterone production which increases beard growth.

Air travellers are statistically more likely to die from a motor vehicle accident on the way to or from the airport than from a deep vein thrombosis caused by the flight.

The word penicillin is derived from the Latin word  penis, not with its modern meaning, but originally meaning tail, particularly the long hairy tail of a horse. A small tail was called a peniculus. The moulds from which penicillin was originally grown had a tufty appearance resembling multiple small tails, and from this scientists concocted the word penicillin.

WATER

Humans are 67% water, a cow is 74% water, bacteria 75% water, potatoes 80% water and tomatoes 95% water.

PROTEINS

There may be as many as one million different types of protein in a human body. Proteins are made from a string of amino acids. There are 20 common amino acids, and strings of them from 100 to more than 1000 in length are necessary to create a protein.

OXYGEN

Oxygen is poisonous to a large number of bacteria known as anaerobes, and oxygen is used by white blood cells to kill these invading bacteria.

BACTERIA

Every square centimetre of skin has about 100,000 bacteria on or in it.

The gut contains 100 trillion (1012) bacteria of at least 400 different types.

The body contains ten quadrillion (1016) bacteria.

Humans cannot exist without bacteria. They allow us to digest food, synthesise vitamins in the gut, break down carbohydrates, convert nitrogen into amino acids, and destroy unwanted microbes.

Bacteria supply the bulk of the oxygen we breath.

Bacteria can reproduce a new generation every ten to thirty minutes. As a result they mutate very quickly, and although most mutants die, an occasional one will be resistant to antibiotics or more virulent.

MEDICATIONS

One quarter of all prescribed medications have been derived from just 40 plants.

FUNGI

There are over 70,000 species of fungi, but only about a dozen cause diseases in humans.

The average human contains about ten thousand trillion (1016 or 10,000,000,000,000,000) cells.

The ova (egg) is 80,000 times larger than the sperm that fertilises it.