First Lightning, Now Deer Glands
The saga of the North Korean women’s soccer team, already suffering from an epidemic of lightning strikes, has gotten weirder: Five of the team’s players have tested positive for steroids.
Now you’re saying to yourself, how much bad luck can one team have? But, shockingly, these two events are not unrelated. It turns out—according to North Korean officials—that the players were using medicine from the glands of the Asian musk deer to treat the effects of the lightning.
It is unclear if the musk deer itself contains a gland that generates anabolic steroids, if musk deer gland secretions were mixed with steroids and then given to the team as medicine, if musk deer gland secretions can be mistaken for steroids, or if there’s rampant abuse of steroids in the musk deer population due to the intransigence of the commissioner of Musk Deer League Baseball. (I hear MDLB attendance is way up, though. But that’s purely anecdotal.)
“The gland in question comes from musk deer living in a large swath of Asia from Siberia to North Korea,” reports the Associated Press. “The hairy gland is usually cut open to extract a liquid that is used for medical purposes.”
Lance Armstrong declined to comment.
[Photo: Musk deer by Dan Coulter/Flickr]
