Tapeworms on the brain

Here's a fun fact: Did you know that you can get tapeworms in your brain? You know that you can get a tapeworm from eating infected meat. But when people have tapeworms in their guts, they secrete tens of thousands of eggs a day. And those eggs can end up on food, or other things that people put into their mouths. For some reason—nobody is really sure why—tapeworm eggs that are ingested by humans never mature into adults. Instead, they remain in a larval stage and hang out in a host's bloodstream. Sometimes, they make it to the brain. And, apparently, this happens often enough that it has an actual medical name: Neurocysticercosis.

The good news is that these things are mostly harmless. They don't seem to hurt your brain at all while they're alive. The bad news: As soon as the larvae die, your body's immune system seems to suddenly realize they exist and it goes into overdrive—triggering seizures, loss of feeling in the body, and sometimes leading to death.

Scientific American blogs has the story of one woman in California who had this happen to her. To save her life, surgeons had to remove a calcified tapeworm larva from her brain.

Sara Alvarez was afraid.

It was December 20, 2010, in Sunnyvale, Calif., a town that lives up to its name. The West Coast winter, not as long or as harsh as seasons in the East, gave her the opportunity to take her youngest child out for an afternoon stroll.
In the fading light of dusk, Alvarez, too, began to fade. She lost the feeling in her right leg. Her right foot followed suit. She couldn’t lift or move her right hand. She was weak, and her body was numb.

The National Institutes of Health classifies neurocysticercosis as the leading cause of epilepsy worldwide, and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that tapeworms infect 50 million people globally. The CDC says an estimated 1,900 people are diagnosed with neurocysticercosis within the United States yearly.

Read the rest of the story at Scientific American blogs. (WARNING: Surgery images!)

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

Maggie goes places and talks to people. Find out where she'll be speaking next.

MORE: brain • Delightful Creatures • horrors • medicine • neglected diseases • Science • tapeworms

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Mantissa128

Gah… argh… eeeewwww.

[looks at cereal]
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=673251060 Ryan Brown

reminded me of: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiqTTozWNhA

I guess maybe too soon?
Maverick

Maggie, if that’s a fun fact, I’m really dreading the bummer ones.
zpss

Maggie, we know very well why ingested tape worm eggs never turn into full adults. Tapeworm eggs hatch into juveniles, which invade muscle tissue. Later, when the host is eaten, the encysted juveniles mature into adult tapeworms which occupy the intestines. This is their normal life cycle, not some unknowable quirk. Can I recommend that you listen to This Week in Parasitism, hosted by the inventor of vertical farms, Dickson Despommier? It is easily the best podcast in all existence, and will have you falling in love with tapeworms by the end of if.
- http://maggiekb.com/ Maggie Koerth-Baker
  
  I was basing that off of what I read in the Sci Am post. But I’ll definitely check out This Week in Parasitism.
- http://nelc.livejournal.com/ NelC
  
  Oh, so that’s the other reason that tapeworm eggs as diet pills are a bad idea?
  
  Also: EW!!
http://halfbakedmaker.org Robert Baruch

So… scratch that one off the diet list.
- CH
  
  Yeah… not that it ever was on my list, but yeah… scratch it off… no, burn it off!!!
  
  “The National Institutes of Health classifies neurocysticercosis as the leading cause of epilepsy worldwide, and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that tapeworms infect 50 million people globally. The CDC says an estimated 1,900 people are diagnosed with neurocysticercosis within the United States yearly.”
  
  Say whaaaaat???? Leading cause of epilepsy worldwide??? 1,900 cases of neurocysticercosis a YEAR in the US???? Ewwwww… but as a leading cause of epilepsy, how isn’t there more noise about this? (I assume because it is in non-first-world-countries mostly.)
  - http://maggiekb.com/ Maggie Koerth-Baker
    
    Yup. That’s something they get into in the Sci Am piece. Definitely worth a read for that aspect. Neglected diseases are a big deal.
jkonrath

Well, this certainly made me stop thinking about 9/11 and start freaking the fuck out about something else.
- http://maggiekb.com/ Maggie Koerth-Baker
  
  You’re welcome.
- Boundegar
  
  If you stop being afraid then the terrorists have already won!
Paul Coleman

This is not a wonderful thing.
pebird

I can’t use my neti pot, and now I can’t eat my breakfast.
- snowmentality
  
  You can use your neti pot with distilled water!
colin

Where’s my !@$#ing unicorn?
- http://mjfgates.myopenid.com/ mjfgates
  
  That tapeworm-infested unicorn can emit tens of thousands of tapeworm eggs daily.
Jorpho

To be clear: the picture above is of post-op stitching and not of a worm bulging beneath the skin, right?
- SumAnon
  
  no worms in the whole article
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  To be clear: the picture above is of post-op stitching and not of a worm bulging beneath the skin, right?
  
  Bless the Maker and his water.
  Bless the coming and going of him.
  May his passage cleanse the world.
chaopoiesis

During the course of a natural lifecycle, the proglottids are discarded through their host’s anus. A family member, friend or restaurant cook infected with an adult tapeworm can secrete tens of thousands of tapeworm eggs daily, which can be easily ingested by others.

I’m having trouble seeing the “easily”.
- snowmentality
  
  The infected person doesn’t wash their hands properly after using the bathroom, so the eggs are still on their hands when they do something like make you a sandwich. Same way GI viruses are easily transmitted.
  
  (And yet, probably 90% of people I see in public restrooms don’t wash their hands with soap. Most people just run their hands under the water for a second and go.)
http://www.disoriented.net/ angusm

As FDR put it, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Also, tapeworms laying eggs in our brains.”

I’d like to believe that this is as bad as it gets, but if I say anything to that effect Maggie will discover some kind of parasite that hatches in your sinuses, emerges from your eyeball, climbs down your face and eats your tongue before laying its eggs in your lungs. And I don’t want to hear anything about that one, understand?
- http://maggiekb.com/ Maggie Koerth-Baker
  
  You should really avoid reading Carl Zimmer. He’s even worse about this than I am. ;)
- http://halfbakedmaker.org Robert Baruch
  
  But that parasite also makes you love cats, so it’s all good.
- Lyle Hopwood
  
  Cymothoa exigua is the tongue-eating one you want, or rather don’t want. It eats a fish’s tongue and then lives in the mouth pretending to be one. Warning: If you search for and find pictures of it, you won’t be able to unsee them.
James Penrose

Apparently whoever is in charge of “intelligent design” is a right bastard to create stuff like this.
millie fink

So vegetarians can’t get tapeworms?
- http://www.peterbagge.com/ Buddy Bradley
  
  Not that I’ve ever regretted it, but now I’m REALLY glad to be a vegetarian…
- CH
  
  You can get the eggs through somebody who has an infection (for instance, doesn’t clean their hands properly after going to the bathroom and then prepares the food you eat). But these would only become larvae (the ones discussed here in the article).
  
  You would probably be protected from eating the larvae cysts, which would then grow into an adult tapeworm (the long thingy you usually see pictured).
Halloween_Jack

Look up Nightmare Fuel at tvtropes.org sometime. You’re welcome.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Or just do a GIS for mucormycosis (not recommended).
fiatrn

Ahh neurocysticercosis… a somewhat common finding at my old ER when we would CT scan trauma patients. Maybe not once per weekend, but once per month seems a reasonable memory. It was much much more common in the Mexican immigrant population, which always made us wonder about diet & cooking habits in people’s home towns. Most anitbiotics kill the larvae, but as the article notes, the scarring seems just as or more causal to the seizures (what a terrible sentence, but I can’t seem to finesse the grammar tonight). One friend always claimed it was mostly from undercooked pork, but I never saw research that honed in on a particular food vector.

The FiatRN
Denver, CO
benher

Remember when this used to be a blog of “wonderful things?”
- CH
  
  Don’t you think knowledge is a wonderful thing?