World War II was a scary time; every nation involved was trying to build arms bigger and more dangerous than the arms of their enemies. The United States had projects to create incredibly destructive bombs, and eventually, developed nuclear warheads. This immense power was thought to be the most horrifying weapon ever used, let alone the worst from that era.
Biological warfare, however, can be difficult to detect; remember how long it took us to figure out that one strain of smallpox was engineered by Vlad the Impaler? We didn’t discover that it was created in the “Vlad Lab” until just a few years ago. Now, with some amazing new technology in the field of Historical Biology, we can determine where diseases derive from. One of these diseases is a particularly famous, and horrific, one; Hiccups.
That’s right, the hiccup, often regarded as “Nature’s Greatest Hint of Hating Humanity,” is actually not a creation of nature at all; instead, it was created in laboratories, near Munich, Germany, as part of the Axis powers’ attempt to use powerful biological weapons against the Allied powers. Going on the information given by this new technology, we were able to find some information from these labs:
“We are nearing completion of the virus; theoretically, when it strikes, it should cause any human being to instantly go into cardiac arrest.”
Obviously, this doesn’t happen; the virus isn’t strong enough. However, extended cases of hiccups can easily make one wish for cardiac arrest.
The worst part about hiccups is that they stay in your system. Once you get them, they never fully go away; they only go into remission. Then, hiccups can come back at any time, triggered seemingly by nothing. This is another mystery just recently solved: The trigger of hiccups is, in fact, nothing. This randomizing aspect makes the disease particularly dreadful.
Luckily, very few people have died from hiccups, and the Nazi forces found them to backfire, so that we are not the only ones plagued with the illness. Some say Hitler himself died of hiccups; others think he killed himself after having a bad bout of them. Either way, hiccups are here to stay.
Weekly Science Week 