'I walk into a room and people start coughing and sneezing. It can't be in my head'
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On rare occasions that Medinah leaves her home, people around her will cough, sneeze and rub their eyes. "I am the allergen," the 23-year-old, who did not want her full name used, tells Sky News. She is one of a group of people with a condition so rare it does not have an official medical name.
It is known simply as People Allergic To Me - often shortened to PATM. Medinah spent a year online searching her symptoms before she found social media support groups and the name that had been coined there. During those months, she worried she was "crazy": "I thought, yes, I'm losing it now. But then after a year and the constant reactions with people, I just realised this cannot be in my head, I can't be crazy, I'm seeing this in real time.".
Hay fever-type symptoms. Several of the people in those groups spoke to Sky News. They described people developing hay fever-type symptoms in their presence, saying as much as 90% of a room would start coughing, choking, or sneezing when they entered. They detailed the immense toll of isolating themselves to avoid these reactions. Some said they had been suicidal; others talked of losing friends, giving up jobs, and spending hundreds of pounds on possible remedies.
Last year, PATM sufferers had a glimmer of hope. A researcher in Japan published the first cohort study on the condition - and it indicated there could be a physical cause. Speaking to Sky News from Tokyo, Professor Yoshika Sekine from Tokai University describes what he found when he compared the skin gases emitted by 20 people with PATM to a control group of 24.
