They tied strings or attached clamps to their penises
because they were convinced their private parts were going to
shrink and cause them to die.
Bizarre? It happened to hundreds of men in Singapore in
1967.
Intrigued that the "strange, crazy thing happened in a
country of intelligent, hard-working people", US psychiatrist
Scott Mendelson wrote about the Koro epidemic in a book, The Great
Singapore Penis Panic And The Future Of American Mass Hysteria.
Koro attracted attention after a newspaper reported
that some people developed the disease from eating pork from pigs
inoculated with anti-swine fever vaccine.
The book, published last year, is one of seven
shortlisted for the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the
Year. Another is Cooking With Poo.
Read the full story in The New Paper on Friday (March
9).
Source: http://www.tnp.sg/content/penis-epidemic-was-all-pork-and-bull-says-book
