Research has consistently shown that reading tabloid newspapers such as the Sun, Express and Daily Mail causes an obsession with borders, contagious fatalism, addictive irritable incoherence syndrome, an anxiety-inducing paranoia, a pre-occupation with foreigners and other people stealing tax payer’s money. It’s thought to be the fault of vagabonds, migrants, the EU and scrounging poor, everyone knows offshore banks and tax avoidance are run by the EU. A highly suggestible state results, presenting with swollen spite, distended misery guts, clinical resentment retention, rash folk devils and suppurating moral panic.

These symptoms usually precede the completely incapacitating open mouth of closed-mind syndrome, leading to premature, ejaculated brain death.

Sociologists have discovered that many unfortunate tabloid addicts have nasty outbreaks of brazen neighbours, usually from other countries, or with very dodgy disabilities. Some poor and self-rightously outraged readers even have suspiciously lazy single mothers, layabout, loutish students, suspected illegal foreigners wearing cunning disguises or daring unemployed bad sorts living right next door or just down the street. This is usually preceded by a malignant disdain that is difficult to contain.

Although there has been fierce debate about the aetiology of this condition, sociologists believe that it’s psycho-semantic. The cause also precedes the effects. In other words, it is the victims of these nasty epidemics of dodgy bad sorts that actually manifest those symptomatic phenomena, during fits of psycho-enigmatic, convulsive curtain twitching, whilst presenting further shocking symptoms of frank, febrile tutting. 

Health officials carried out research over many years, which revealed  that during the early stages of chronic tabloiditis, acute, screaming headlines bind to the victim’s brain and dopamine receptors, releasing a surge of bile and some other unidentifiable, free-floating, profuse bitter stuff. This has the unfortunate effect of oxidising the part of the brain ordinarily used to rationalise and the nubbin in the noggin that usually facilitates discernment. The deadly process also affects the vocal chords, leaving the poor patient with an over-developed sense of indignance and a hyper-reactive moral outrage. This culminates in excessive sweating, incoherent shrieking and convulsive knee-jerk responses.

The most alarming health survey reports have revealed that the process involves rapid shrinkage and withering of the gland that regulates reality uptake – the part of the body that scientists call the “getagrippe.”  This reduces the reader to thinking in unsound soundbites, leading to a terminal condition called “end-stage pernicious gullibility.” Once patients reach this stage, there is little hope for them. They tend to rapidly succumb to the malignant “cuttingyournoseofftospiteyourface” syndrome.

For example, many patients suffer a dreadful condition involving hallucinations that it’s better to have no welfare, human rights or NHS rather than have other people using them. In particular, patients tend to stipulate that unless they alone need to use tax-funded public services, they should be blown up or demolished, so no-one else can use them. Some have resorted to self-lobotomising, whilst other hopeless cases mimic end-stage Rumplestiltskinism.

Another symptom is that patients become clinically cynical. These poor victims become increasingly intolerant of everyone else, especially anyone claiming benefits, who chaf their considerably swollen sensibilities. This common reaction is a severe allergic response to others, along with a strong dose of feverish outrage manifested in the obsessive compulsive thought that anyone else should be punished regularly with public floggings, being hung, drawn and quartered and no supper. Or anything. 

Once a person is in a super state of autoimmunity to others, (a condition that some in the government Nudge Unit call “Pavlov’s delight”) the body rejects the spleen, which exits the body through the bile duct and vents. Transplants have been unsuccessful, with issues around host and grafting and NHS tourism, leading to further rejection, atrophic anomie and gonadotrophic adenoids, empathy deficiency heart failure syndrome, brought on by persistent exposure to viral epidemics of the protestant work ethic.

The patient becomes fixated on what they think everyone else has, particularly the poor, and it’s always thought to be a lot more than what the patient has, though this is usually fueled by short bursts of media stereotypes, acute delusions of impacted resentment with profuse sub-arachnoid diarrhoea, spasms of inferiority complexes and feverish exaggerations, culminating in the fatal vomited outcry of “they’ve got a flat-screened TV, an iPhone, and two scruffy kids and a packet of fags that I paid for, the cheeky scrounging b*stards.”

It’s a pernicious, humourless disease that leads to rapid degeneration and further distress through pustular outbreaks of inflamatory comments, extensive diversionary metastases, profound rectal aphasia and ultimately, to a terminal and toxic irrelevance leaking like pus from the brain and mouth. The patient is usually unaware that he/she is mortally offensive to other people at this stage. Painful class envy and terminal false consciousness follow, inevitably.

The contamination was believed to have originated from 2010, when an acute case of Murdochitis broke out and spread to other media. Some sociologists pin-pointed David Cameron’s government as the main source of the outbreak, though many public health officials have argued that Cameron’s lot were merely the original carrier of the deadly bug.

Evidence suggests that even some of the working class on the left of the political spectrum are succumbing rapidly to chronic, deteriorating narksism. This is usually characterised by a pitiful and repetitive cry of “Blair blah blah red Tory. That Nigel Farage speaks his mind.” Unfortunately, Nigel Farrage’s mind causes further contamination, which requires radical treatment in cultural isolation units, but there is currently no cure for having associated symptoms like phobias of God’s wrath and gay rain flooding.

Many narksists have succumbed to the terrible agony of massively enlarged bolsheviks. There’s been a reported number of tragic suicides associated with the condition, and so far, thirty people have been found hung by the baubles on christmas trees after their extreme state of delirium had inexplicably led them to vote for turkeys. What a terrible way to go.

There is no cure for these epidemics, and officials don’t think there is any hope for sufferers in sight until at least 2020. Then there’s a small chance of putting them out of our misery.

Iain Duncan Smith has denied that there is any cause for concern, and today, determined to demonstrate tabloid safety, he ate a full Daily Mail in front of cameras in a public place. Despite growing contrary evidence from experts in their field, government advice, meanwhile, is to keep taking the tabloids.