Shocking story of a man with a Strange virus infection "Half man Half Tree"

For 20 years, the warts studding Dede Kosawa's hands and feet multiplied and sprouted like gnarled roots.

His hands looked like contorted, yellow-brown branches extending 3 feet. Unable to clamp his hands into a fist or pick up a fork, he made his living by performing in carnivals in rural Indonesia. He became known as the Treeman.

"His life was taken away from him," said Dr. Anthony Gaspari, an American dermatologist who traveled twice to Indonesia to treat Kosawa. "He was severely disfigured and was sent into a rural isolated village where he was sheltered from his peers. With good reason, he was a sad man. He wanted to be cured and he wanted hope."

The growths encrusting his arms accounted for nearly 12 pounds of his 100-pound body. Kosawa, 36, often became exhausted after taking a few steps because of the dense warts on his feet. The growths that carpeted his limbs were posing more problems.

"He was getting infected," said Gaspari, chief of dermatology at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland. "He had insects living in the base of the wood-like material."

Doctors believe that Kosawa's case was a perfect storm, created by a genetically inherited immune defect and a type of human papillomavirus, or HPV. Kosawa told doctors that the warts started appearing after getting a cut in his skin as a teenager. There are hundreds of types of HPV, some of which are linked to cervical cancer and others that cause common warts that can be acquired through cuts.

"The HPV-2 virus that causes common warts is the same exact wart virus that he's infected with, except it was growing out of control," Gaspari said.

Kosawa has a deficiency of white blood cells, which are crucial in fighting infections, and his weakened immune system couldn't fight the HPV. The virus hijacked his skin cells, causing it to produce massive amounts of keratin, a protein found in hair and fingernails. The warts sprouted into dense growths known medically as "cutaneous horns" on his hands and feet.

"I had never seen anything this severe," said Gaspari, a dermatologist for 25 years. "I shared this case with my colleagues, and no one had ever seen this before."

He became involved in Kosawa's case after being approached by a dermatology journal and Discovery Health Channel. His travels to Indonesia are chronicled in the channel's documentaries and the second chapter, "Treeman: Search for the Cure," which premieres Sunday on Discovery Health.