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)."

Comments

Not just Bbbbrrrraaaiiinnnssss!!!

[ackthpt]

As California is a gateway, thanks to its border with Latin America and many international airports (plus a few containers brought to shore filled with asian imigrants, one was found abandoned at sea a few years ago) we gots lots of happy little bugs.

It's not difficult in some corners of the world to buy a false health certification, which allows someone with rampant Tuberculosis to come on in and cough among us. (thanks to this I went on a 9 month course of Isoniazid as a preventative meausre, 9 months of total suck) Further there are people coming from rural backgrounds in SE Asia who have various gut and blood parasites, they move to the big city, get a leg up and move to the US. There's some pretty graphic examples of what peasants could have in their guts in the way of big worms thanks to eating food grown in fields fertilized by raw manure from infected oxen, goats, etc., and walking around in same fields bare footed. A mobile population in the world means this is going to happen more often, everywhere.

Don't like it? Maybe mandatory health screenings for visitors to the US, but if you even start talking about it you'll be called all sorts of names by various groups and who is going to pay for it?

Not just West Nile that's getting around.