Odd: Global Edition

The comments under the reel show how travellers are not only confused between Austria and Australia. Instead, some of the most common mishaps among passengers are

Sydney in Nova Scotia and Sydney in Australia
Budapest and Bucharest
Slovenia and Slovakia
Ontario in California and Ontario in Canada
California’s San Jose and Costa Rica’s San Jose

A Brazilian woman was arrested at an airport in Bogota, Colombia, on Monday for attempting to smuggle 130 poisonous dart frogs out of the country, officials said.

The woman was flying out of El Dorado International Airport on her way to São Paulo, Brazil, via Panama when she was detained by authorities, Colombia's environment ministry said in a news release.

After searching her luggage, authorities found the poisonous frogs hidden in film canisters.

"This endangered species is sought after in international markets," Bogota Police Commander Juan Carlos Arevalo said, according to AFP. Arevalo added that private collectors might pay up to $1,000 for each, AFP reported.

In early 2023, a rare but deadly form of meningitis began appearing across the United States, especially among patients who had undergone cosmetic surgery at two clinics in Matamoros, Mexico, a city across the border from Texas.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a notice to alert doctors in May, and they began finding dozens of confirmed and probable cases across the U.S., especially in Texas, as well as in Mexico. Patients who had been to the two clinics were notified that they may have been exposed to the fungus.

A bewildering outbreak
There were three bewildering things about this outbreak: first, the meningitis was fungal rather than bacterial or viral, which is already unusual – but it's even more unusual for a fungal meningitis to appear in young people who aren't immune-compromised.

Second, it was drug-resistant, so none of the drugs on the market could combat it – which meant patients would die without effective treatments.

And third, the fungus was attacking the brain stem with unusual fervor. It was eating away at the blood vessels of the brain stem, breaking and clotting the blood vessels until patients suffered strokes, aneurysms, brain hemorrhages, brain swelling and eventually death.

In a study published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers describe 13 cases of the fungal meningitis, nine of which were fatal, at three Texas hospitals. Three of those patients remain on an experimental medication.

The patients tended to be young women, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who had received epidurals for surgeries like tummy tucks and Brazilian butt lifts between Jan. 1 and May 13, 2023, at the two clinics.

The epidural medications seem to have been tainted with the fungus, which entered the spinal fluid and worked its way up to the brain stem. In the weeks after their surgeries, the patients began reporting headaches and low-grade fevers that soon worsened into horrific medical complications. In total, 12 patients with probable or confirmed cases died in this outbreak..

While there are always risks with epidurals, infections like these are vanishingly rare when proper sanitary procedures and regulations are followed. The investigation in Mexico is still ongoing, but experts believe there was likely a breach of these procedures. At the time, there was a shortage of morphine, a common ingredient in epidural anesthesia, and it's possible the morphine was procured or stored in "less than ideal" conditions, said Dr. Luis Ostrosky, division director of infectious diseases at UTHealth Houston and one of the study authors.