Jack Osbourne Reveals He Contracted a Rare Disease From Rat Urine

Jack Osbourne recalled a terrifying brush with death after inadvertently coming into contact with rat urine while while on location filming a reality show years earlier. And despite being treated by a crack team of medical experts, it sounds very much as though he's lucky to be alive.

The 38-year-old opened up about the incident on the most recent episode of The Osbournes Podcast, which he co-hosts with his father, Ozzy Osbourne, sister Kelly, and mother Sharon. "I got leptospirosis, which is just like a crazy viral disease," he said. "Yeah, that sucked."

Leptospirosis is a blood infection caused by the bacteria found in animal urine and feces, that can spread to humans from contaminated water or soil through contact with the eyes, mouth, and nose, or through cuts in the skin.

"For people listening, I'd gone and done some filming in a place called Bario in Malaysia, which is like, similar to Borneo, and we were doing a jungle track," Osbourne explained of the incident, which occurred during season three of his ITV2 series, Jack Osbourne: Adrenaline Junkie. "I got really sick when I got out of the jungle, but it took about two weeks incubation period and by that point I'd left the jungle."

"So I'd come back to London and then I'd gone to Finnish Lapland," he continued. "I was doing like a dog sledding thing in the North Pole, and I got really sick up there, and I got medevaced."

At that point, Kelly interjected to note that their mother was "screaming her head off" and calling the military for help.

"I literally was dying," Osbourne revealed. "Having a tropical disease when you’re in Finnish Lapland ... they were looking at me being like, 'We don’t know what to do.' And so I got medevaced to Helsinki. I get put into the university hospital there. No one speaks English in Finland at all, it's not like Sweden or Denmark. So mom got the plane, I get flown to London."

"At this point, I’m like five days into like, my body legitimately shutting down," he said. "And I’m lying in this bed, I haven’t eaten, my kidneys and liver are like going into failure and I'm like, ‘Uh, I’m f--king losing it.'"

Osbourne said that he had about six doctors standing around his bed grasping at straws with possible diagnoses such as malaria and even HIV. But finally, one of them solved the mystery, just in the nick of time.

"And then this guy who was the head of tropical diseases for the [National Health Service] I think, he’s like the number one guy, left," he recalled. "And at 7 a.m. comes running into my room days later like, 'I’ve got it!'"

As it turns out, Osbourne had Weil's disease, which is the acute, severe form of leptospirosis that can cause jaundice, kidney failure, and internal bleeding.

"I got it because I’ve got leech bites on the bottom of my feet," he remembered later realized. "And I was swimming and bathing in a river and we were climbing on rocks and jumping into this jungle river and I stepped in a puddle on this like boulder and it had rat’s piss in it."

Apparently, as he continued, leptospirosis isn't that uncommon even in England, especially among people who go fishing in rivers if they prick their finger on a fishing hook and come into contact with contamination. But he said the only place he's actually sees signs warning against the condition have been in Hawaii.

There are an about one million severe cases of leptospirosis occurring in humans globally every year, which cause an estimated 58,900 deaths.