Just the most dazzling follow-up to my cutaneous horns research

Posted on January 26th, 2008 by Carlos

First post of the new year! I took January off from posting, mostly because I had so much class prep. to do for the course I am piloting this semester, which will use the Diplomacy game board to teach persuasive writing (!). More about that on another post.

So I noticed, when checking out my poor, long-abandoned blog, that someone had linked my initial cutaneous horns post to a collection of posts from around the web that looked at the same phenomenon. Cool!

And it was there that I came across this story:

Tree man who grew ‘roots’ may be cured — BODY UNABLE TO CONTAIN WARTS

This poor, poor man got a cut when he was 16 that infected him with the Human Papilloma Virus. In certain cases, HPV can cause cancer — there’s a fairly new vaccine out for it to prevent that from happening. But most of the time, HPV isn’t cancer causing; in most people, it’ll give you a few warts and that’s about it.

But Dede (the article gives only one name for the name; I guess he’s like Cher or Madonna) has an ultra-rare genetic condition that keeps his body from properly controlling HPV. So the virus went nuts, and generated the growths that earned him the moniker “tree-man.” But the growths were actually cutaneous horns.

So now I am wondering: are all cutaneous horns caused by HPV? Are they all just really really really big warts?

I think my devil character in my novel, however, is going to claim to have the “tree-man” genetic defect. Have to find out if it has a specific name though — article didn’t mention one. Maybe I’ll just call it “Dede’s disease?”