A man with a facial disfigurement says he was asked to leave a restaurant in south London because staff said he was “scaring the customers”.
Oliver Bromley has Neurofibromatosis Type 1, a genetic condition that causes non-cancerous tumours to grow on his nerves.
Speaking to the BBC, he said when he had gone to place an order at a restaurant in Camberwell, staff told him there had been complaints about him.
“It’s a horrible thing to happen. I took it very personally on the day,” he said.
Not the person you were talking too, but I think where you’re losing people is that no one else is looking at his face and thinking “measles”…there is a picture in the article and that’s not what measles looks like…at all. In any way. Your continued insistence that it “might be contagious” when no reasonable person would come to that conclusion really makes it look like your trying to use an excuse to be uncomfortable with the guy for daring to be in public.
Also stop trying to equate this with coughing. No one whose made it to adulthood thinks this guy has any sort of contagious pox, that not what they look like and it doesn’t take a doctor to know that.
That’s fine. It doesn’t have to be measles. Monkeypox is also doing rounds in the news and there are plenty of other serious diseases that have bumps, blisters, spots and the like to be concerned about. Also consider that the restaurant likely did not have similarly bright lighting to reveal the details of a disease in a photograph, nor would most concerned have gotten as close as the camera did. The point is there is no reason to consider a condition not contagious until informed otherwise and people are forgetting to set aside the omniscience a news article provides. Equating this with coughing helps convey this overwhelmingly complex concept to the many many people that apparently need the simplification.
Ya’ll want to take this clearcut case of simpleminded revulsion and apply it universally to everyone involved without proof. One of the patrons could very well have simply asked ‘is he contagious?’ and the waiter, like many out there apparently (even, say, a journalist trying to sensationalize the article), simplified the ask to a lowest common denominator. Even if the article does show clearcut revulsion from all the patrons involved, you cannot generalize that behaviour to everyone, and even the poor victim gets this which is why he, at least, is so understanding.