The danger: A debilitating staph infection

The source: Good Housekeeping

The account: "Jo Gilchrist found herself with an incredible back pain that just wouldn't quit....It kept getting worse and worse until the young mom had to be airlifted for emergency surgery. 'I honestly thought I was going to die,' she [said]. 'The pain was worse than childbirth.'

The details: "As doctors eventually discovered, Gilchrist had caught a serious community-associated MRSA infection that had attacked her spine."

"[Gilchrist] has a feeling she knows where she caught [it]. 'The only thing we can put it down to is the makeup brush,' she said of the tool she borrowed to cover a pimple. 'My friend did have a staph infection on her face and I was using her brush just before. I had no idea that could happen, I used to share with my friends all the time.'"

The bottom line: Dump your makeup brushes. All of them. In fact, dump your friends too. They're not worth the risk.

The danger: Slipped disks, strokes and blindness

The source: Self

The account: "She slipped out of bed and fell to the floor, the entire right side of her body limp....'I knew that if I let myself pass out, I'd probably die...' she says. 'She dragged her body to the phone to dial 911.'"

The details: "She had torn her left carotid, one of the two arteries located in the front of the neck that supply the head with blood; a clot had then formed and traveled to her brain.... Her doctors agreed that the likely cause of the tear was yoga."

The aftermath: "After her stroke, Susan Eaton avoided practicing yoga for roughly a year. 'I felt betrayed by yoga, and the hardest thing was to return to my mat,' she says."

The fine print: "It's not likely, but if you extend your neck and look toward the sky, you can tear one of the carotid artery's layers," says Eaton's neurologist...."These things can happen spontaneously, and you don't want to falsely accuse a form of exercise."

The bottom line: Another great excuse to skip yoga class this Sunday.

The danger: A parasitic infection

The source: Cosmopolitan

The account: "Four days after Nicole Luongo graduated from college, she mysteriously passed out in a bookstore. 'All of a sudden, I had a pain in my side. I dropped and couldn't get up for five minutes....It felt like the equivalent of 20 bones being broken," she says.

The details: "'I drank from a water fountain at my college graduation,' she [told her gastroenterologist]. The doctor stared at her, shaking his head. 'I'm pretty sure you have giardia.'"

The fine print: "Usually, a course of antibiotics will clear it up, but ... the doctors made a startling discovery: Nicole had an immune deficiency so severe that she lacked white blood cells....She had no immune system to recover."

The bottom line: Make sure to receive a battery of invasive blood tests before drinking anything but Perrier.

The danger: Cancer

The source: Women's Health

The details: "Gonzalez had a cancerous tumor removed from above his left ear, and another tumor removed from his left hand, according to SunSentinel.com. He believes both may have been caused by his cell phone."

The "proof": "There's a good amount of research that suggests cell phone radiation has the potential to be hazardous."

The bottom line: Add cell phones to the list of things that might-could-maybe-probably-not give you cancer, next to crossing your eyes for too long and standing in front of the microwave.

The danger: A blood infection

The source: Cosmopolitan

The account: "Three days after a normal shave, I noticed a small, reddish bump on my bikini line....Twenty-four hours later, it was a throbbing, golf ball-size mountain....I looked three months pregnant."

The details: "'It's staph,' the doctor explained....When it enters the skin -- through a small cut, like from shaving, waxing, or a picked ingrown -- it can create an abscess that grows.' If it isn't drained within days, it can spread internally and cause a deadly blood infection called sepsis."

The bottom line: Let those pubes grow, girl.