Following this week’s story about young men in Kalasin province disguising themselves as women to avoid being killed by what villagers were calling “a ghost of a widow”, a local doctor visited the town and was able to provide a medical explanation behind the recent deaths there and… guess what? It wasn’t the wrath of a ghost.
Dr. Pornpat Poonaklom, director of Nong Kung Si Hospital, traveled to Pu Hong village with his team on Monday to investigate the deaths of two men and three women that had died there in the past three weeks.
While villagers believed it was either a thirsty widow spirit or a “pop” (a type of Thai ghost who goes around possessing people and eats filthy things in their home) that was on a killing-spree in their community, Dr. Pornpat had a more mundane explanation for the deaths: noncommunicable diseases (NCD).
NCD are a class of medical conditions that, according to World Health Organization, causes 71 percent of all deaths globally. They are not infectious and thus they cannot be transmitted from person to person, but are instead caused by an individual’s lifestyle and environment, including age, genetics, exposure to air pollution, and behaviors such as smoking, unhealthy diet, and physical inactivity.
NCD can refer to chronic diseases that progress slowly for an extended amount of time or those that result in rapid deaths such as cancer, diabetes, chronic kidney disease or Alzheimer’s.
In an attempt to make the superstitious villagers become more aware of the risk factors, Dr. Pornpat, along with a nurse that specializes in mental health and a Public Health officer, conducted a stress assessment as well as provided health care advice for the community.
According to Workpoint, the informal lecture attracted about 100 attendees.
Additionally, Dr. Pornpat promised that a mobile physician from Nong Khai Province would perform a health check-up in the village’s community hall, however, local media did not specify when that would occur.
To assure the villagers that ghosts were really not the cause of the recent deaths, Dr. Pornpat revealed the autopsy results of the five recently deceased individuals. According to medical examinations, the causes of death were diabetes, a stroke, and arterial disease. The last death was a teen girl who was killed in a motorbike accident, Banmuang reported.
Perhaps the next time there are a rash of mysterious deaths, villagers will look for a simple medical explanation before assuming supernatural causes are at play. But we’re not holding our breaths.
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