"Bagpipe Lung -" Topic

For those who hate bagpipes there is hope -

By the time the man arrived at the lung disease clinic in Manchester, England, it was almost too late.

It was April 2014 and the 61-year-old had spent the past seven years finding it harder and harder to breathe.

Once able to run 10 kilometers, he could now barely walk 20 meters.

His lungs were operating at a third their proper capacity.

Doctors were stumped.

Five years earlier, the man had been diagnosed with a serious inflammation of the lungs, known as hypersensitivity pneumonitis, or HP.

HP has a variety of other names, each one of which offered a possible solution to the medical mystery: farmer's lung, hot tub lung, humidifier lung and, perhaps oddest of all, pigeon fancier's lung.

Unable to determine the cause of his condition he was treated but died in October of 2014.

Now, however, nearly two years after the man's death, doctors say they have solved the medical mystery.

In a report published Monday in the medical journal Thorax, a team of five UHSM researchers coined a new term for the man's condition.

"Bagpipe lung."

According to the paper, when doctors initially tried diagnosing the man's illness, they overlooked his daily hobby: playing the bagpipes.

Tests conducted on the man's bagpipes found a slew of fungi and yeast living inside the musical instrument.

Inside the air bag was a mixture of Paecilomyces variotti, Fusarium oxysporum, Rhodotorula mucilaginosa, and Penicillium species. In a petri dish, they formed a psychedelic swirl of green, orange and red mold.

There was pink yeast on the instrument's mouthpiece as well as fungi on the neck, chanter, chanter reed, chanter reed protector, bass drome and tenor drome, researchers found. Even the bagpipe carrying case had mold inside.

The moist, airtight bagpipes made an ideal home for the spores.

Unknown to the piper, who was not named in the study, every time he played his instrument, he was inhaling a mixture of mold that caused his illness.

link

So, if a piper isn't properly maintaining his instrument he may be killing himself. Just not quickly.

Well it is classified as a weapon by some :)

I knew a guy whose emphysema was cured when he took up the pipes.

They'll never take my bagpipes away unless they pry them from my cold dead fingers.