He should’ve done a tick Czech.
A priest in the Czech Republic sliced off his own penis with a knife after he was allegedly driven psychotic by a tick bite.
“We don’t know exactly what happened, it was probably a health problem,” the mayor of Českobudějovick, Southern Bohemia, where the alarming incident occurred, told local media.
According to Czech outlets, locals first realized something was awry after the unnamed clergyman failed to show up to a prearranged meeting.
Paramedics busted down his door, after which they found the priest lying unconscious in a pool of blood with his penis severed, News reported.
The imperiled man of God was subsequently rushed to the local emergency room, where medics discovered that he also sustained injuries to his genitals. Due to his deteriorating condition, doctors put the man into an induced coma and placed him on a ventilator, which he remained on for 10 days, the Daily Mail reported.
Unfortunately, medics had difficulty finding out what had transpired beforehand due to his comatose state.
“He is lying unconscious in the ARO ward [critical care unit],” David Henzl, vicar general of the České Budějovice diocese, told local media. “Due to these circumstances, it is impossible to find out what really happened.”
However, doctors did discover central damage to the patient’s nervous system, which appeared to be viral in origin, per the religious leader’s testimony.
Henzl claimed that the priest had suffered from tick-borne encephalitis, also known as TBE, which is the swelling of the brain caused by a tick-transmitted disease, per Daily Mail.
In its advanced stages, this condition can induce personality changes and even psychosiswhich was believed to be the case with the priest.
According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the Czech Republic is one of the countries with the highest incidence of TBE in Europe, recording between 500 to 1,000 cases per year.
The risk is particularly great in the South Bohemian region, where the incident occurred.
Meanwhile, the clergyman was also said to be experiencing health problems the day before the incident.
Authorities have since ruled out any foul play. “We are not investigating any illegal actions,” said Jiří Matzner, a spokesman for the South Bohemian police.
Unfortunately, Eastern Europe isn’t the only place where ticks are wreaking havoc. The annual number of tick-borne disease cases has more than doubled in the US over the past two decades amid rising tick populations, climate change and improved methods of tracking diseases.
Lyme disease is far and away the most prevalent. The US’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention records some 36,000 cases each year with a large concentration occurring in New York.
Over the past decade, the Empire State has seen an average of 6,700 new cases of Lyme disease each year with over 8,000 in 2019 alone.
To prevent contracting a disease, experts advise wearing long sleeves and pants before venturing outdoors, and coating one’s skin with repellents like DEET or spraying the insecticide permethrin on clothes and hiking shoes.
They should also conduct me-tick-ulous body checks after returning home from a hike.
If an embedded bloodsucker is located, the CDC advises removing it with fine-point tweezers using slow and steady pressure, making sure to get as close to the skin as possible to extract the barbed mouthparts.
