Oliver Bromley has a genetic condition that causes non-cancerous tumours to grow on nerves.

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.

  • Deceptichum@quokk.auEnglish
    142·
    2 months ago

    Your irrational hatred and fear of people who have facial disfigurements does not protect people.

    There is zero others wellbeing defended by your response because no one is at risk from this, you are only hurting another human by excluding them from society.

    • Cephalotrocity@biglemmowski.winEnglish
      115·
      2 months ago

      This isn’t about the disfigurements. It’s about having prominent symptoms of a possible contagion. Honestly getting annoyed at the prevalence of illiteracy in a primarily text medium. I have no hatred and have expressed concern for the poor man in the first comment or have you forgotten already, or skipped it in your eagerness at the opportunity to white knight a straw man?

      If someone entered the eatery you were at coughing so badly they could barely speak you wouldn’t be the least bit concerned? '‘just put an earplug in’! lol

      • BottleOfAlkahest@lemmy.world
        131·
        2 months ago

        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.

        • Cephalotrocity@biglemmowski.winEnglish
          111·
          2 months ago

          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.