Medicine:Male menstruation
Male menstruation can describe:
In a medical sense, "male menstruation" colloquially describes a type of bleeding in the urine or faeces caused either by surgical infections, or by schistosomiasis, the latter reported in a handful of tropical countries and more recently en masse in countries where medical assistance is readily available.[1] It is the notion that male Jews are suffering of monthly menstrual bleeding, being part of the wider claim that Jews were collectively of feminine gender.[citation needed]
In schistosomiasis
The term "menstruation", or its equivalent in native languages, is sometimes used by natives of affected areas to refer not only to menstrual bleeding, but also to refer to bleeding in the urine or from the anus caused by schistosomiasis.
Name
Affected locals, uneducated at best, when this condition happened in men, thought it not of major concern before modern medical knowledge, and so referred to it as the male equivalent of female menstruation.[1]
Causes
The symptom is actually caused by numerous factors.[1] In first world countries it is often related to surgical infections, but is, in impoverished countries and massive tropical areas most indefinitely related directly to a parasite infestation of the urinary tract or intestines by Schistosoma haematobium - also known as snail fever.[1] A disease caused by the parasitic flatworms called schistosomes.[1]
Epidemiology and manifestation
Most commonly affected are farming communities that live and work in wet marshes and waterlogged places such as rice fields throughout Asia, where most young boys unknowingly contract Schistosoma, and the parasite begins to cause damage internally throughout their stomach and intestines.[1] The labour combined with parasites eating away at organ walls causes haemorrhage bleeding from body orifices (mainly the urethra, anus).[1]
In far more, less reported cases, it is found that boys in an affected area who work in a factory environment, instead of the teeming parasite habitat that is knee-high paddy fields, are very rarely diagnosed with Schistosoma, which helps outline where exactly the problem emerges from and whether or not if it is affecting drinking water sources. In one case, when a boy who at puberty started work in a factory instead of the rice fields, did not start the schistomiasis bleeding, his father took him to a doctor asking for investigation of primary amenorrhoea.
Use as antisemitic libel
In connection with the notions of Jewish deicide and later also of blood libel, "impure blood", and Jewish femininity as a collective marker, the libelous antisemitic concept of Jewish male menstruation developed in Christian thought from the end of the Middle Ages through to the modern era.
See also
References
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