- If ever there is a continuing fear in life, it is that
Franz Kafka has predicted a moment in all our collective futures when he
imagined Josef K awaking one morning and finding that he had turned into
a cockroach.
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- Only the fundamental dread isn't of becoming an insect,
but of suddenly being afflicted with a possibly fatal condition that transforms
our appearance, overturns our life and completely baffles doctors as to
both cause and cure.
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- Over the past 2 months, Viktor Yushchenko has played
out his and our Kafkaesque scenario. The pro-Western Ukrainian opposition
leader's face has gone from looking like a middle-aged version of teen
scream Ben Mulroney to someone whose skin and flesh seem to have risen
up in revolt against him.
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- Smoothness has given way to acne and pockmarks. Skin
colour is now a gluey, greenish-yellow. One eye has been partly paralyzed
and everything looks swollen. His back aches, his stomach hurts and no
doubt waves of fear of an imminent death daily wash over him.
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- The dramatic change has given birth to what remains a
medical mystery framed by open fears in a highly unstable Ukrainian political
climate that what Mr. Yushchenko might be suffering from is the aftermath
of a botched assassination effort.
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- The most recent context is that doctors at the private
Rudolfinerhaus clinic in Vienna, which Mr. Yushchenko checked into on Sept.
10, have told the media that their search for the cause of the various
and persistent symptoms has to date proved fruitless.
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- To ensure that they haven't overlooked something, blood
and other samples have been shipped off to an undisclosed facility in the
United States for a second opinion.
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- "They [the Americans] are still considering the
theory of poisoning, but also finding difficulty in proving it," said
Michael Zimpfer, president of Rudolfinerhaus.
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- Medical experts in Canada trying to figure out what ails
Mr. Yushchenko based on his visual symptoms have come up with a variety
of possibilities.
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- While food poisoning from sushi has been suggested by
Mr. Yushchenko's opponents, this doesn't seem probable. "Sushi, I
should say, would be very, very, very unlikely," said Vincent Ho,
a professor of dermatology at the University of British Columbia. "Usually,
food poisoning is an acute event and is self-limiting, not to mention that
it shouldn't give facial changes like that,"
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- "It could be just a very severe rosacea," said
Charles Lynde, a professor of medicine with a specialization in skin disorders
at the University of Toronto.
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- Rosacea is skin roughening and reddening that, while
treatable by antibiotics, flairs up from time to time. It was the cause
of the famously mottled face and bulbous nose of American comedian W.C.
Fields.
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- Prof. Lynde also points out that a variety of drugs,
including the antidepressant lithium, the immune-suppressing drug prednisone
and the heart medicine amiodarone, creates severe skin reactions.
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- Another drug darkhorse would be some kind of herbal skin
anti-aging cream, which "can, in fact, do the opposite of what it
was taken for," he says.
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- But Mr. Yushchenko's continuing skin eruption and discoloration,
especially when linked to acute pancreatitis he also suffered, continues
to point to poisoning.
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- One thing that strikes everyone is that, in photographs,
the Ukrainian politician's skin looks like a classic case of chloracne,
which was identified in Germany more than century ago. Chloracne's conjunction
of acne and pimples can be produced by various poisons. Mercury, arsenic,
silver and the dread herbicide dioxin leap to people's minds.
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- The latter achieved political infamy under the name Agent
Orange, a chemical that the U.S. Army sprayed on the jungles of Vietnam.
Its subsequent effects were so severe that it became the source of lawsuits
against the U.S. government by its own soldiers who had been accidentally
sprayed with it.
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- The problem for conspiracy theorists is that a variety
of standard laboratory tests should have turned up in relatively short
order signs of drugs, heavy metals or dioxin-like compounds in blood, hair
or tissue samples.
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- Health Canada chemist J.J. Ryan, who has studied dioxin
poisonings in Russia, points out that the chemical can remain in the body
for decades.
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- All this uncertainty has led the Austrian doctors to
wonder whether some unknown virus might be behind Mr. Yushchenko's facial
transformation.
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- "A viral illness can be something that you never
definitively find," Marc Siegel, an associate professor at New York
University's School of Medicine, told the Associated Press last week. "If
it is a virus, I'd expect it to get better."
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- While a mystery virus doesn't seem likely to the Canadian
experts, they also are baffled. "You need to be Sherlock Holmes to
figure this out," Prof. Lynde concludes.
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- - Stephen Strauss writes on science for The Globe and
Mail.
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- © Copyright 2004 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
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- http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20041127.
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