Fun_People Archive
11 Apr
MYSTERIOUS EARACHE CAUSED BY UNWANTED SOUVENIR

Date: Mon, 11 Apr 94 13:41:05 PDT
To: Fun_People
Subject: MYSTERIOUS EARACHE CAUSED BY UNWANTED SOUVENIR

Forwarded-by: bostic@vangogh.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Forwarded-by: Eric Allman <eric@CS.Berkeley.EDU>
Forwarded-by: "Bret A. Marquis" <bam@Bang.COM>

BC-HEALTH-EARACHE (EMBARGOED)
MYSTERIOUS EARACHE CAUSED BY UNWANTED SOUVENIR

 Release at 6 p.m. EST)
    BOSTON (Reuter) - A 50-year-old air traveller returned from
a trip to Europe with a mysterious earache and an unwanted
souvenir, doctors reported in Thursday's New England Journal of
Medicine.
    The man, who had complained of persistent discomfort in his
left ear, was mystified when physicians found and removed a
small foam rubber cylinder from inside his ear.
    He insisted he had no idea where it had come from.
    A month later one of the doctors flew on the same airline
the patient had used and discovered the earpiece on the
in-flight headsets exactly matched the cylinder pulled from the
patient's ear.
    ``We have identified a probable source of foreign bodies in
the ear identified with in-flight headsets,'' Drs Henry Kahn and
Sandra Maryman of Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta
concluded in a letter to the medical journal.

© 1994 Peter Langston