Surgeons remove rare tapeworm from man’s brain

January 21, 2015  13:36

Four years ago, doctors saw a British man who had been complaining of headaches after visiting China, South Korea, Japan and Thailand. They treated him for tuberculosis, but when he returned, he exhibited a host of more bizarre symptoms, CNN reported.

This time, in 2013, the man reported weakness in his legs and was also having seizures. After an examination, doctors determined the cause of his pain: Sparganosis, an infection that is rare outside of Asia and is caused by a parasite. In the case of the British patient, who was not named, the Spirometra tapeworm, which caused the infection, had burrowed into his brain and began feeding on his body.

According to Foxnews.com, surgeons at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge had to surgically remove the tapeworm from the man’s head because there is no known treatment for the condition.

According to CNN, only 300 infections of the Spirometra tapeworm were recorded between 1953 and 2013, and little is known about its populations because they live in rural areas of the world.
“These worms are pretty mysterious,” geneticist Hayley Bennett from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, in Cambridge, whose team has sequenced the genome of the rare worm, told CNN. “We know it has a very complicated life cycle.”

What researchers do know is that the adult form of the Spirometra tapeworm only appears in the intestines of cats and dogs, but when the worms’ eggs are released through these animals’ feces, they can contaminate water and eventually infect humans.

Doctors predict that the worm took hold on the British patient when he was swimming in a lake and accidentally drank the water.

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