WILTIMS #78: Children of the Night

TIL: Half of what we digest, we produce in the form of secretions and dead cells.

Xeroderma pigmentosa is a fascinating if awful disease. Sufferers are born without the proper cellular machinery to repair UV damage. The upshot of which is that they cannot be in the sun. Ever. Even the tiniest bit of UV light causes severe sunburn and blisters, then freckles and dark growths, and finally countless skin cancers. If caught early and followed by life-altering concessions by the child's family, children can live into their 20s (the oldest can reach their 40s).

These kids live very different lives from their unaffected peers. They must be home-schooled in their windowless home or teleconferenced into a classroom. They can only go outside at night and often convert to a mostly nocturnal lifestyle. To go anywhere, such as a doctor's office, they must be cocooned in a sleeping bag and carried around. None of these precautions are really possible in developing countries and the prognosis is far worse for affected children (see image on the left).

This disease make us remember that we take for granted how marvelously skilled our bodies are at fighting off mutations. By just walking in the sun we expose each of our skin cells to hundreds of mutations every minute. Our cells work tirelessly every moment to let us navigate the unsafe environment we live in, called Earth.