BEIJING, June 21 (Xinhuanet) -- Unless you're a regular at the late-night pub scene (think drunken brawl), you may find it difficult to believe that men often bite men when they fight.

    "It's fairly horrendous, but that's what they do," said study leader Patricia Eadie of St. James's Hospital in Dublin, Ireland. "It's not just here in Ireland."

    Recent research revealed that 5 percent to 20 percent of bite wounds treated in urban emergency rooms in the United States were caused by humans, making human bites the third most common mammalian bite in this country.

    Eadie and her colleagues present statistics from their recent study about human-on-human bite wounds in the July issue of the Emergency Medicine Journal, although the overall incidence is unknown.

    The medical team analyzed the charts from 92 patients with human-bite injuries treated by the plastic surgery service at St. James's Hospital between January 2003 and December 2005.
They focused on so-called occlusive bites, meaning a skin chomp, such as the 1997 Mike Tyson-Evander Holyfield boxing match when Tyson bit off a portion of Holyfield's ear.

    The other type, a "fight bite," occurs when someone's fist strikes an opponent's tooth, breaking the skin of the hand and possibly harming the knuckle joint. Alcohol consumption was reported in nearly 90 percent of the injuries, with 70 percent of bites occurring on a weekend or public holiday.

    "The majority of these injuries occur in young males following (drinking) a lot of alcohol," Eadie told LiveScience. "One of the problems is that the bars all close at the same time. So there's a lot of discharge of people out onto the streets who have had a lot to drink, and I suppose tempers flare up very easily; fights happen."

    Seven out of 10 bites were to the face, and most of these involved the upper rim of the ear. Other facial targets included the tip of the nose.

    (Agencies)