Following a tick bite that sent him into a delusional state, a priest from the Czech Republic sliced off his penis with a knife.
After friends became concerned when the priest didn’t arrive for a pre-arranged meeting, they tracked him down to his residence in a little town near Českobudějovick.
Firefighters had to break through three doors to get him, and he was discovered with severe damage to his genitalia.
After arriving at the hospital, his health worsened to the point that he was placed into an induced coma and ultimately required the assistance of a ventilator to breathe.
The priest’s supervisor, David Henzl, disclosed that he had contracted tick-borne encephalitis, which triggered inflammation of his neurological system and ultimately created a kind of insanity.
Earlier, the authorities had eliminated the possibility that the priest’s injuries had been inflicted by someone else.
Due to his unconscious condition, physicians had a hard time determining what had happened previously. However, according to the doctors, the patient’s central nervous system had damage that seemed to have a viral origin.
With 500 to 1,000 cases annually, the Czech Republic is among the European nations with the highest incidence of tuberculosis (TBE), according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
Due to increased tick populations, altered weather patterns, and better disease monitoring techniques, the yearly incidence of tick-borne illnesses in the United States has more than quadrupled in the last 20 years.
The most common one is Lyme illness. Nearly 36,000 cases are reported annually by the CDC in the United States, with a disproportionate number of cases in New York.
New cases of Lyme disease in the Empire State have averaged 6,700 each year over the previous decade, with over 8,000 reported in 2019 alone.
Specialists recommend wearing long sleeves and trousers before going outside and applying repellents such as DEET or permethrin on clothing and shoes to avoid becoming sick.
