Horror as man mutates into a living tree

It wasn’t witchcraft or a mad scientist that turned Dede Koswara into a tree–it was biology.

More than twenty years ago, Dede Koswara, an Indonesian fisherman cut his knee as a teenager. Soon thereafter Dede noticed “roots”–a type of cutaneous wart-like growth–began to emerge from his arms and feet. As the roots grew livid welts began to appear randomly all over his body. The welts were inflamed and painful if touched. The condition left Dede a semi-invalid.

Unable to fish anymore, Koswara took odd jobs and even agreed to appear as a paid sideshow freak. He desperately needed money. His wife abandoned him calling him a monster. She left him to fend for himself and the two young children the couple had before his affliction worsened.

Poverty-stricken and a social pariah, Koswara thought more than once about ending it all. Fellow villagers derided him and treated him as an odd joke. Little children threw rocks at him and then dashed away screaming and laughing.

Legions of doctors from across the Far East took time to study his affliction. A general consensus was reached that somehow warts had begun to grow abnormally leading to Koswara’s debilitating condition. Unfortunately, none knew how the warts had begun mutating, how the spread of the disease could be slowed or how to stop it.

American dermatologists to the rescue

Doctors at the University of Maryland became interested in the tree man’s case. Several dermatologists took it upon themselves to research maladies in the past that were similar in nature. Led by Dr. Anthony Gaspari, they concluded that Koswara suffered from a rare immune-deficiency that allowed common warts to replicate unchecked: the Human Papilloma Virus or HPV.

HPV is a fairly common skin infection that normally causes small warts to erupt upon the epidermis. But after studying blood samples from Koswara, Dr. Gaspari determined that a genetic flaw probably caused the Indonesian man’s body to promote the wart’s growth instead of inhibiting them. He made arrangements to meet Koswara at his home south of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia.

After a series of tests conducted at Koswara’s home by Gaspari, the doctor developed a regimen to rid Koswara of the affliction.

Dr. Gaspari learned that the virus infecting Koswara was unable to be constrained by the malfunctioning immune system. It therefore could “hijack the cellular machinery of his skin cells,” he explained.

Once the cells had been taken over the virus then began generating huge quantities of an enzyme that caused “cutaneous horns” a tree-like growth composed of mutated epidermal tissue and the cellular matter that creates normal human nails and hair. The growth began erupting from his extremities.

“The likelihood of having his deficiency is less than one in a million,” Dr Gaspari told an interviewer. It’s certainly an understatement because of the estimated six and one half billion people in the world only Dede Koswara is known to suffer from this acute affliction.

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Article © Copyright AYM Communications. 2010