My friend and I were watching the movie The Others. In the movie the two kids have a fatal allergy to light. My friend doesn’t believe me that it’s a real disease, and I can’t come up with a good site. So, can you really have a fatel allergy to light?
One of the symptoms of porphyria is sensitivity to sunlight.
Is xeroderma pigmentosum what you’re looking for? It’s an extreme sensitivity to UV rays. It something to do with DNA being unable to repair itself. A lot of people with it die at an extremely young age of skin cancer.
IIRC the kids in The Others didn’t actually hace a fatal alergy to light, just an extream hypersensitiviy.
And I know this doesn’t really qualify as a site, but when I was 10 my elementary school was used as the location for a CBS movie of the week about a kid who had this allergy, “based on a true story”. I remember because the kid had his first attack at school and I had nightmares for weeks about me waking up one day and suddenly being allergic to light. So at the very least the writer of The Others didn’t make the idea up. Doesn’t mean it is a real disease, just that they didn’t come up with the idea.
That’s it - the dvd for The Others has a special feature called “Xeroderma Pigmentosum: What is it? The Store of a Family Dealing With the Disease Portrayed in The Others.”
So that means they can still be around light inside, but they can’t be where there is sunlight?
[QUOTE=flamingbananas]
So that means they can still be around light inside, but they can’t be where there is sunlight?
IANAD or anything close to that, but everything I’ve read seems to point to the sensitivity being towards UV rays specifically. So light that didn’t give off UV radiation would be okay, but stay the hell away from tanning beds. There was a special on TLC or some channel like that recently that profiled people with XP, and they all wore sunscreen with the highest possible SPF constantly, even at night. They re-applied something like 12-15 times a day, even if they were spending all their time indoors. Apparently, just being indoors isn’t enough protection.
Hopefully someone who actually knows something about xeroderma pigmentosum will actually step into this thread.
From my somewhat limited understanding, incandescent light does not contain the UV radiation that affects kids with XP. XP is a syndrome where children show an increased sensitivity to UV waves (read:sunlight) These kids cannot be in the sun for more than a couple of minutes without developing a sunburn of the highest degree. These children are not allergic to the sun, per se, but they are much more sensitive to it. Think about in these terms when a “normal” child gets a sunburn, these children will have blisters, and worse.
There’s some kid in the UK who has to wear a special suit made by NASA whever they go outside. I don’t know the disaease or the details of the child (most probably a teen now), but the story has been featured in a few documentaries.
Or even an extreme hypersensitivity.
I think NBC did a “trading spaces” type show recently where they re-built a home almost from the ground up to accomodate a young girl in the family who had that disease. The idea was to eliminate UV light from the home, so all of the house’s windows were UV-filtered, and the girl’s room was windowless with a simulated skylight. All of the bulbs in the house were either fluorescents with no UV component, or incandescents behind filters. The front driveway even had a large shaded carport like most hotels do.
From the XP Society website (link above) it is evident that XP is not an allergic response, but a problem with DNA repair mechanisms. Exposure to UV radiation causes specific kinds of damage to DNA – the most common is a reaction that causes two adjacent thymine (T) bases on one of the strands of DNA to fuse together. This is called a thymine dimer. In individuals without XP, several methods of repairing this sort of damage to DNA exist.
For example, there are enzymes that can remove a section of DNA that includes a thymine dimer. Another set of enzymes then uses the bases on the opposite strand of DNA (the one that was not damaged) to insert a replacement for the damaged section. This is called nucleotide excision and is one of several methods available for repairing UV-related damage.
Individuals who have XP are missing one or several of the enzymes necessary to do this sort of repair. Thus, they are less able to repair the damage caused by UV radiation than individuals who do not have XP. (AFAIK, the other methods of repairing UV-related damage still work for people who have XP, but their ability to repair damage is substantially less than in people who do not have XP.) In people with XP, the damage caused by UV accumulates over time and lesions and skin cancers can develop much more easily than in people without XP. The damage is cumulative, which means that the more the person is exposed to UV, the more damage occurs. Avoiding exposure to UV light is thus necessary, although someone with XP can remain relatively healthy if they are not exposed to UV light. (Indoor lighting produces much less UV than the sun, and it appears that people with XP need to be mostly concerned about exposure to sunlight.)
The XP Society maintains that protective clothing is not necessary and that using a UV meter to monitor exposure to UV radiation is the most important thing necessary to avoid UV and maintain health. Presumably, protective clothing is purchased mostly by parents who badly want their children to have a normal life and play outside in sunlight (somewhat analogous to how parents with severely asthmatic children undertake expensive measures such as buying elaborate air filters for this reason). The XP Society considers this an unreasonable risk, since the DNA damage from UV radiation is cumulative in people with XP, and the risk of cancer increases each time the person is exposed to UV. It would be far safer to avoid all exposure to the sun than to purchase clothing – which may not be as effective as its manufacturer claims – to allow a child with XP to play in full sunlight.
There is also a genetic disorder called Cockayne’s syndrome that includes hypersensitivity to ultraviolet radiation among its symptoms. Besides this, Cockayne’s syndrome also causes unusually low height, developmental delay, and can cause deafness, blindness due to cataracts, and a characteristic facial appearance.
More technical information on Cockayne’s syndrome is available from Swiss-Prot here. This includes information on the specific genes involved. A similar page for xeroderma pigmentosum is here. Detailed technical descriptions (with extensive literature references) for each condition and their subtypes can also be found at Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man.
I watched a documentary about kids who had this disease, more precisely about a summer camp for them. They would stay inside all the day, and the windows would be covered, etc… When they had to get outside, they would be fully covered and wearing a hood. They would bring them to the beach at night so that they could swim and play. Despite all this, they all had visible skin lesions.
Much less serious, though annoying I knew a couple people who were “allergic to sunlight” (that’s how they would call it, I don’t know what’s the actual name of it) in the sense they would get small local skin reactions when exposed to bright sunlight. They would take drugs for a couple week or so, IIRC, before taking vacations in a sunny place. One of them had this problem appearing sudenly, lasting some years, and dissapearing.