Warning : don’t read further if you’re eating now.

Yesterday a friend forwarded me an email about an anthropologist named Susan McKinley who returned from a South American expedition to notice a very strange rash on her breast caused by larvae which were feeding off the fat, tissue, and even milk canals of her bosom. The email then exhorted readers to wash their newly purchased undergarments before wearing them so as not to have the same fate befall them.

The message also came with picture of a breast with merry maggots peeping out of holes. It reminded me a lotus seed pod like this one. I don’t want to paste the breast photo here, it’s truly gross but just imagine a little maggot peeping out of each hole and you’ll get the picture.

Now I’ve always had a healthy appetite but it was ruined yesterday. The image of the maggots kept flashing through my mind and each time it did, I felt my scalp prick and goose pimples popping up my arms.

This morning, I woke up with one thought foremost in my mind. I will ask a doctor friend if this larvae infestation thing in the breast is possible. I had the uneasy feeling that the photo had been doctored.

So I was elated when I opened my inbox to find an email refuting the larvae infestation story. It was from a Jocelyn who had also received the same message. She had checked it out on Snopes (now why didn’t I think of that) and confirmed that the picture had been digitally manipulated. Don’t click on the above link if you’re the queasy sort like me. The gross picture is there. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

No known medical condition causes a result like the one depicted here, and the breast tissue around the supposed “larvae infestation” (larvae of what?) is too healthy (no redness, inflammation, or necrosis) to be believable. This image appears to be the product of the melding of a photograph of a woman’s breast and a picture of something similar to a lotus seed pod.

Yeah, I was right! The image was inspired by a lotus seed pod. Jocelyn wrote :

This is a fake pic, as far as i know, larva and maggots only eat DEAD tissue or corpse, only ring warms will attach on skins. Ring worms is from Africa even though you wash the clothing, it might still alive, that’s why they have to iron the clothes to make sure the ring worms will be fully killed.

Eureka!

But the image has been branded into my brain. It pops up unannounced at the most inappropriate time, like when I’m about to eat. Sigh, I think I will take a leaf from Wally Lamb’s heroine in his novel She’s Come Undone. Dolores who was as fat as a whale lost weight by imagining mould growing on her food. Her visualization was vivid enough to ruin her appetite so successfully that she shed the extra kilos in no time.

No need to go for those slimming courses. Just imagine maggots wriggling their heads with a “Hi, it’s yucky us. Now dump that yucky chocolate cake before it makes you fat.”