Tapeworm Brain Damage - Doctors of a 50-year-old Chinese man made a shocking discovery when they examined his brain after complaining about constant headaches, seizures and memory flashbacks for the past four years.
In what seemed like a nightmarish diagnosis, the patient actually has a tapeworm in his brain, damaging his day-to-day living as it wriggled back and forth in the center of the nervous system.
According to Medical Daily, doctors identified the worm as Spirometra erinaceieuropaei and they believe that the benign worm had been burrowing in the brain matter of the Chinese man for four years prior to its removal.
Fortunately, for the patient in the tapeworm brain damage news story, the worm that was removed was a benign one. If it were a different and more aggressive type, it could have laid eggs in the organ and damaged it through and through.
Prior to the removal of the worm, the man had been complaining about recurring headaches and random memory flashbacks, as well as seizures.
The symptoms even stunned doctors as they struggled to appropriately diagnose the patient.
He was previously tested for other diseases like tuberculosis, HIV and Lyme disease, but every test he took turned out negative.
It was only later on when doctors thoroughly examined the patient's brain that they found a 4-inch long tapeworm damaging the brain as it traveled back in forth from the two hemispheres, reports Los Angeles Times.
After it was successfully removed, the worm was sent to the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England for examination and analysis of the parasite's genome.
The Institute aims to go deeper into the tapeworm's genome so that they can provide guidelines on how to prevent the occurrence of the bizarre case.
In a study published in the journal Genome Biology, scientists noted that Spirometra erinaceieuropaei requires up to three hosts to mature to its adult form and that this type of worm can live in a variety of tissues.
For the most part, the worm only thrives in its secondary larval form in humans known as sparganum, which is not really that dangerous since it cannot proliferate but it can move around inside the human body.
Meanwhile, the Chinese man, who has been residing in Britain for more than 20 years now, has fully recovered with the help of the surgery and anti-worm drugs.
As of late, it isn't clear yet how the man got the brain-damaging tapeworm inside his system, but researchers claim that he could have contracted the worm during one of his frequent visits in China, The Independent has learned.
"We did not expect to see an infection of this kind in the UK, but global travel means that unfamiliar parasites do sometimes appear," noted Effrossyni Gkrania-Klotsas, an infectious disease specialist at Addenbrooke's NHS Trust.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
