if you are eating this food, there is a chance that worms will invade your brain. And the worst thing about it is that once they are consumed and enter your organism, they move throughout your body — your eyes,your tissues, and most commonly your brain. This is a classic parasite, but also a very dangerous one that can get into your head.
Dr. Effrossyni Gkrania-Klotsas, while examining the head of a British man in 2013, found a tapeworm. They have never before seen this tapeworm in the United Kingdom.
The team of doctors at Addenbrookes Hospital at Cambridge, 4 years earlier, had a patient – a man who first experienced symptoms such as headaches. But after a short period of time the patient returned. This patient, a Chinese descent who had recently visited China, which along with Thailand,Japan and South Korea, had most of the regular occurrences of the parasite known as Spirometra erinaceieuropaei.
Dr. Gkrania – Klotsas said “When the patient returned, he had all new symptoms”. The worm was now pushing through to a new part of his brain. It started causing weakness in his legs and seizures. In fact, the condition associated was the infection Sparganosis. Upon diagnosis doctors had to be quick to remove the worm surgically, because there is no known drug to effectively treat the infection.
300 infections of the Spirometra tapeworm were recorded in the period between 1953 and 2013. Infections are thought to be more common among the population that has very little knowledge about worms,in some parts of Asia.
The form of the Spirometra tapeworm adult only occurs in the intestines of dogs and cats but as these animals shed they excrete the worm’s eggs in their feces,and the eggs can enter and contaminate the water. The resulting juvenile form of tapeworm the larvae can then stay in the water within certain small crustaceans for a long time or it can easily end up in snakes and frogs.
Through direct contact with infected animals or ingestion, these larvae can invade humans. According to Gkrania – Klotsas, they had a patient in Cambridge who had accidentally drunk water whilst swimming in an infected lake.
Bennett said “The larvae can encyst in the brain or any other place in the human body”. These cysts can cause blindness,paralysis, tissue damageor even death. Bennett hoped to understand these sequencing from the worm’s genes and the inner working of the worms to aid future treatment and diagnosis.
Creating a drug just for this worm isn’t economically viable,because it is a very rare infection, but by comparing it to other similar tapeworms the researchers can see which other drugs might apply.
They extracted small samples of the wormfrom the infected patient, which could act as future drug target as well ashelp recognize resistance to drugs. They will identify an exceptionally large genes and genome from these small samples. Bennett adds “You could also develop a diagnostic test”.
Pork tapeworms
Of the many forms the tapeworm can be found int, 3 of them have the ability to infect the brain. Helena Helmby from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said “It’s mainly the pork tapeworm that’s the main brain”.
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