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Aerophobia

The English suffixes -phobia, -phobic, -phobe (of Greek origin) occur in technical usage in psychiatry to construct words that describe irrational, disabling fear as a mental disorder (e.g., agoraphobia) and in biology to descibe organisms that dislike certain conditions (e.g., acidophobia). In common usage they also form words that describe dislike or hatred of a particular thing or subject. more...

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Many people apply the suffix "-phobia" inappropriately to mild or irrational fears with no serious substance; however, earlier senses relate to psychiatry which studies serious phobias which disable a person's life. For more information on the psychiatric side of this, including how psychiatry groups phobias as "agoraphobia", "social phobia", or "simple phobia", see phobia. Treatment for phobias may include desensitization (graduated exposure therapy) or flooding.

The following lists include words ending in -phobia, and include fears that have acquired names. In many cases people have coined these words as neologisms, and only a few of them occur in the medical literature. In many cases, the naming of phobias has become a word game.

Note too that no things, substances, or even concepts exist which someone, somewhere may not fear, sometimes irrationally so. A list of all possible phobias would run into many thousands and it would require a whole book to include them all, certainly more than an encyclopedia would be able to contain. So this article just gives an idea of the kind of phobias which one may encounter, certainly not all.

Most of these terms tack the suffix -phobia onto a Greek word for the object of the fear (some use a combination of a Latin root with the Greek suffix, which many classicists consider linguistically impure).

In some cases (particularly the less medically-oriented usages), a word ending in -phobia may have an antonym ending in -philia - thus: coprophobia / coprophilia, Germanophobia / Germanophilia.

See also the category:Phobias.

Phobia lists

A large number of "-phobia" lists circulate on the Internet, with words collected from indiscriminate sources, often copying each other.

Some regard any attempt to create a list of phobias as an irrational endeavor because, theoretically, a person could become conditioned to have a fear of anything. Also, a significant number of unscrupulous psychiatric websites exist that at the first glance cover a huge number of phobias, but in fact use a standard text (see an example below) to fit any phobia and reuse it for all unusual phobias by merely changing the name. For a couple of striking examples.

"... Poor performance or grades. Promotions that pass you by. moths phobia will likely cost you tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of your lifetime, let alone the cost to your health and quality of life. Now Moths Phobia can be gone for less than the price of a round-trip airline ticket."
"... The expert phobia team at CTRN's Phobia Clinic is board-certified to help with Russophobia and a variety of related problems. The success rate of our 24 hour program is close to 100%"

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Bats may cause most rabies cases encountered today - Tips from Other Journals - Abstract
From American Family Physician, 2/15/03 by Bill Zepf

Since the early part of the last century, the number of rabies cases in humans has declined dramatically in the United States. An average of only one or two human deaths from rabies are now reported each year. In the majority of cases over the past 45 years, no documented exposure to a rabid animal could be established. Messenger and associates presented circumstantial evidence implicating bats as the likely vector in most reported cryptic rabies cases (see accompanying figure).

Prophylaxis for possible rabies exposure is expensive and difficult to access, because of the limited supply of human rabies immunoglobulin. In the past two decades, the median number of persons who required prophylaxis because of contact with a human rabies case was 54. The authors noted that earlier identification of cryptic cases could decrease this burden.

Molecular typing has revealed that rabies viruses native to insectivorous bat species accounted for 32 of the last 35 cases of human rabies, and for 26 of the last 28 cryptic cases in which no bite could be documented. Surprisingly, common house bat species were not the usual vector. Two reclusive species not usually seen near humans, the silver-haired bat and the eastern pipistrelle, were responsible for 19 of the 26 cryptic cases.

Surveillance studies of bats sampled randomly from natural populations have shown that fewer than 1 percent are infected with rabies. The majority of infected bats are less than one year old. Most exposures to rabid bats occur in the late summer months; this finding correlates with an increase in human rabies during the fall, because of the usual one- or two-month incubation period between rabies exposure and the onset of illness.

Studies of human rabies cases have identified two factors that are significantly associated with a premortem diagnosis of rabies: a definite or probable exposure to a known rabid animal, and the presence of aerophobia or hydrophobia symptoms in the human victim. The authors suggested the importance of maintaining an increased index of suspicion for possible rabies in any patient who has an acute, rapidly progressing encephalitis. Paresthesias at the site of the bite wound are frequently reported in rabies cases. Agitation or paralysis also may be early signs. In almost all cases, patients with rabies are hospitalized less than one week after the appearance of clinical symptoms; coma usually ensues less than a week after the appearance of signs of encephalopathy.

Different methods are available to establish the diagnosis of rabies. State health departments can provide instructions for submitting samples for diagnosis of the disease.

Preventive measures suggested by the authors include avoiding exposure to wildlife, particularly bats, removing bat roosts in homes, vaccinating pets against rabies, testing for rabies in domestic animals that die rapidly after the onset of illness, and testing for rabies in bats found in the home when exposure cannot be ruled out.

COPYRIGHT 2003 American Academy of Family Physicians
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group

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