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California's Unspoken Health Problem: Brain Parasites
An anonymous reader writes "Sunnyvale, California is a town 40 miles outside of San Francisco, in the Bay Area. As in most of California, the weather is mild, and the winters are short, even sometimes warm. On December 20, Sara Alvarez took her youngest child for a walk in the park in town. As daylight faded, Alvarez lost feeling in her right leg, then her left foot. Her body became numb, and she became weak. At 10:15 pm, her husband drove her to a hospital in Redwood City, about 20 minutes away from their town. There, over the course of Christmas, doctors batted around diagnoses: tumor, cancer. Finally, Alvarez received a brain scan that revealed the truth: neurocysticercosis, a calcified tapeworm in her brain (link contains images of brain surgery)."
This comes from pork, so don't eat undercooked pork. Tapeworms, in general, come from raw/undercooked meat. Pigs just happen to harbor the ones that sometimes go to person's brain.
After RTFA I, for one, DO NOT welcome our new brain parasite overloards
...the trouble with tapeworms occurs when they reproduce. The host expels thousands of the tapeworms' larvae out of their anus, possibly infecting other people.
Don't walk around bare foot.
Don't eat raw vegetables from fields people or dogs poop in
Don't eat raw meat.
Get regular checkups, you can always ask for blood tests to see if you have blood parasites.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Alvarez says she experienced debilitating headaches for 20 years before her diagnosis, but she probably consumed tapeworm eggs much earlier than that. When Alvarez immigrated to the United States in the late 1980s she complained to American doctors of a pain so absolute it blinded her and made her vomit.
The parasites apparently were contracted outside of the United States according to the article contrary to all of the other comments and contrary to what the Slashdot summary seems to imply.
Effectiveness of dried Carica papaya seeds against human intestinal parasitosis: a pilot study.: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17472487
Don't walk around bare foot.
Aren't you thinking of hookworms?
Don't eat raw vegetables from fields people or dogs poop in
Dogs? Because only dogs can have tapeworm infections? If you want to be safe you should avoid eating any raw vegetables that weren't grown somewhere protected from wild animals. Like hydroponic or greenhouse vegetables.
Don't eat raw meat.
Or rare meat. The core of the meat has to reach a high enough temperature to reliably kill the parasites. 145F for pork and fish. 165 for everything else. Note that chefs routinely go lower than these temperatures in order to avoid tough, leathery meat. I would imagine that fish tapeworms are the most common in the US since cooking fish too long will ruin it. And then of course there is sushi.
Get regular checkups, you can always ask for blood tests to see if you have blood parasites.
Blood tests are not considered reliable
Eosinophil counts are not diagnostically reliable. Eosinophilia is sporadically present and does not correlate with the severity of the infection. Eosinophil counts also do not help in monitoring treatment modalities.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Fish tapeworms won't be found in sushi -- fish sold for raw consumption has to be frozen to kill the parasites.
In the United States, sushi fish must be deep-frozen before being served, at a low enough temperature and long enough duration to kill all parasites.
Lots of people have debilitating headaches. To a reasonable approximation, no one gets neurocysticercosis. There are at least three orders of magnitude between "debilitating headaches" (lowballing at 1% per year, 1:100) and neurocysticercosis (overgenerously, 1:100,000 per year). That means at least 1000 MRIs on people with "debilitating headaches" to find one case of neurocysticercosis. At $2000 per MRI, that works out to $2,000,000 just for the MRIs. Or you could give all 1000 people steroids and antiparasitics and get X number of bone fractures, Y number of hyperglycemic episodes, Z number of psychotic episodes, AA number of opportunistic infections, BB cases of severe diarrhea, etc. etc., all on people who don't have neurocysticercosis. Neurocysticercosis doesn't get diagnosed until there are focal neurological signs, or other red flags, that lead down the "brain mass" diagnostic route.
This is why extremely rare disease with extremely common symptoms don't get diagnosed early. It would be malpractice, immensely wasteful and harmful, to test and treat someone for every 1:100,000 disease for their headache before working through all of the more common ailments, because 99.999% of the time they don't have the 1:100,000 disease.