Porphyria: A rare hereditary blood disease, which causes the inability of the body to reproduce heme, the
component of hemoglobin, which is the major component or red blood. Lack of heme causes a porphyriac to experience blood cravings, causing the sufferer of this disease to attack people or animals for their blood in desparate attempt to replace the heme their body could not generate. A driven porphyriac would do this without knowing why he/she had done it.
Porphyria causes skin sensativity to sunlight forcing the sufferer to come out only at night. Garlic, which stimulates heme production in healthy people, contains a chemical that worses then painful symptoms of porphyria. The porphyria sufferer would avoid contact with garlic becaused it caused pain, not because he/she was a Vampire.
More severe symptoms caused by this disease are sores and scars on the skin, exessive hariness, the tightening and stretching of the gums and lips causing teeth to appear fang-like. Aslo, in more severe cases, fingers and nose would sometimes fall off. Bloody sores around the mouth caused by stretching and tightening of the lips may give the appearance of a bloody mouthed Vampire that had recently fed from a victim.
This hereditary disease was more likely to occur in earlier times when travel was less common and inbreeding was more common, and their hereditary factor played a larger role. In some cases relatives may have been bitten for their blood simply because they were handy when the porphyria sufferer needed and immediate supply. These donors might later show the same porphyria symptoms and seem to have become Vampires themselves as the result of having been bitten by one. The truth is that they had already aquired the disease at birth, since the disease is hereditary. In this occurance of the disease many members of the community may have developed the belief in the transformation of become a Vampire in a certain village or community where the disease was more common.
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