You can already guess that drinking human blood is probably not a very good idea, but
have you ever wondered what would actually happen if you tried it?
In this video we answer everything you've ever wanted to know about the risks and consequences
of drinking blood.
These are 5 things that could happen if you drank human blood:
5.
You Could Accidentally Kill Someone You might have thought that vampires only
existed in books and movies, but there's actually a whole subculture of people obsessed
with drinking human blood.
The real vampire community has existed since at least the early to mid-1970s and it is
thought that there are now thousands of people all over the world who identify as real vampires.
Vampire lifestyle is usually associated with Goth and sadomasochism subcultures, and members
of this group are known for their ritualistic blood drinking.
While some of them stick to consuming animal blood, most real-life vampires prefer drinking
human blood since they believe it gives them energy and power.
Since willing blood donors for vampires are hard to find, real vampires usually engage
in the practice of bloodletting with each other.
For centuries, bloodletting was thought to be a legitimate medical treatment, but this
practice has been abandoned by modern medicine – and for a good reason.
Bloodletting is extremely dangerous if performed by a licensed medical doctor or someone with
detailed knowledge of human anatomy.
Not only does bloodletting have no recognized health benefits, it also carries a number
of major risks, including loss of consciousness, anemia, and fluid buildup in the lungs and
around the heart, and sometimes even fatal hemorrhage.
If you were a member of the modern-day vampire community and you accidentally cut a major
artery such as the aorta on another person during the bloodletting practice, that person
could bleed out and die just a few minutes.
The aorta leads directly to the heart and supplies blood to the rest of the body so
when it ruptures - death is almost certain.
All of this means that with real-life vampirism comes the risk of being accused of involuntary
manslaughter and facing a punishment of at least 12 months imprisonment, fines and probation.
4.
You Could Get a Blood-Borne Disease One of the biggest dangers of drinking human
blood is the risk of acquiring a serious blood-borne disease.
While drinking a tiny amount of your own blood most likely won't cause any harm, you can
never really be sure that another person's blood doesn't contain dangerous microorganisms
such as viruses or bacteria.
The most common blood borne diseases are hepatitis B, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
While these conditions can be successfully managed if treated promptly, they could also
prove fatal.
Unlike hepatitis B, there is no effective vaccine against hepatitis C or HIV, so the
only way to minimize the risk of contracting these viruses is by staying away from infected
blood.
It is estimated that about 3–4 million people are infected with hepatitis C annually and
every year more than 350,000 people die from hepatitis C-related diseases, while HIV/AIDS
has cause more than 35 million deaths since the start of the epidemic in the 1980s.
Other serious blood-borne diseases that you can get by drinking human blood include malaria,
syphilis, and viral hemorrhagic fever.
3.
You May Ruin Kidneys Believe it or not, some real-life vampires
claim that that can survive on human blood alone, without ever consuming other foods
or liquids.
Since blood contains about 700 calories per liter, an average adult would need to drink
around three liters of blood every day to meet their energy requirements.
Would this much blood also contain enough of the essential micronutrients though?
But you need more that empty calories to stay healthy and human blood wouldn't provide
you with enough essential vitamins and minerals.
For example, humans need at least 45mg of Vitamin C per day and blood has only around
5mg per liter.
This means that you would actually need to drink nine liters of blood to avoid getting
scurvy, a condition caused by a prolonged deficiency of vitamin C. which would give
you so many calories that you'd rapidly become overweight.
Drinking nine liters of blood daily would put your caloric intake at 6300 calories – enough
to make you morbidly obese in no time.
But with drinking large quantities of human blood comes an ever bigger danger than vitamin
deficiency and that's hypernatremia or salt poisoning.
Human blood contains about 9g of salt per liter, so those three liters you'd be drinking
each day would increase the level of sodium in your blood by around four times your recommended
daily allowance resulting in complete kidney failure.
2.
You Might Be Delusional If you have an irresistible urge to drink
human blood, there's good chance you suffer from a serious psychiatric delusion called
Renfield syndrome or clinical vampirism.
The syndrome is named after the character Renfield from Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic
horror novel Dracula.
In the novel, Renfield is an inmate at the lunatic asylum who suffers from delusions
which compel him to eat living creatures in the hope of acquiring their life-force.
The earliest mention of clinical vampirism in the psychiatric literature can be found
in the psychoanalytic interpretations of 19th century Austrian forensic psychiatrist Richard
von Krafft-Ebing who was the first to make a connection between blood-drinking and sexual
pleasure in people with clinical vampirism.
Descriptions of clinical vampirism can also be found in the literature of forensic psychiatry,
since this behavior has often been an aspect of violent crime.
One such disturbing case happened in Turkey in 2012 when an unnamed 23-year-old man was
hospitalized after slicing his own arms, chest and stomach with razor blades, letting the
blood drip into a cup and drinking it.
After being released from the hospital, the man's compulsion to drink blood became even
stronger and he began stabbing and biting random people on the street in an attempt
to collect and drink their blood.
According to Turkish psychiatrists who worked on the case, the man even got his father to
steal bags of blood from blood banks in order to satisfy his bizarre craving.
Eventually the doctors diagnosed the man with dissociative identity disorder, post-traumatic
stress disorder, chronic depression, alcohol abuse and -- clinical vampirism.
A number of murderers and serial killers have also been known to suffer from the obsession
with drinking human blood and even performed vampiric rituals on their victims.
German serial killers Peter Kürten, also known as the Vampire of Düsseldorf, and American
serial Richard Chase both became notorious for drinking the blood from their victims'
wounds.
Kürten derived sexual pleasure from the smell and taste of human blood, while Chase suffered
from a paranoid delusion that his heart was shrinking and believed drinking blood would
stop it.
1.
You Could Die It's a well known fact that iron deficiency
can cause many health problems, but did you know that too much iron can kill you?
Hemoglobin, a protein molecule found in red blood cells is very rich in iron and regular
consumption of human blood would quickly lead to iron overload, also known as haemochromatosis.
The early symptoms of iron overload include chronic fatigue, abdominal pain, weight loss,
joint pain, weakness, irregular heart rthythm, and skin color changes.
Since our bodies can't get rid of excess iron, all that iron you would ingest by drinking
human blood would end up being deposited in your liver, heart and pancreas.
Over time, the accumulation of iron in vital organs could lead to serious and potentially
fatal conditions, including cirrhosis of the liver, kidney failure, and heart disease.
To sum it all up, drinking human blood is nowhere near as glamorous as popular movies
and TV shows would like us to believe.
While our bodies can digest tiny amounts of healthy blood, regularly consuming large amounts
of other people's blood puts you at a serious risk for developing a number of dangerous
diseases.
So not only would you fail to gain energy and life-force by drinking human blood, you
would actually be putting your life on the line.
Let us know in the comment section below which of these facts about drinking human blood
surprised you the most.
And if you liked this video, don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe.
As always, thanks for watching and I'll see you next time!
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