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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)."
I, for one, welcome our new brain parasite overlo...
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.
Finally a CT scan revealed the malady. Alvarez had neurocysticercosis — a calcified tapeworm lodged in her brain...Nobody cares about this disease, and they should, if not from a humanitarian point of view than from a fiscal aspect, says Wilkins, a scientist with the CDC
JESUS H FUCKING CHRIST! I CARE! How can one NOT care about brainworms!
Forget al qaeda! America has a NEW ENEMY! And it is brain tape worms! Take all my taxes, draft people, use those milimeter wave scanners on every street corner, suspend the constitution, I don't care, just keep these terrifying slimy things out of my cerebral cortex!!!
Why can't we get parasites that make us super intelligent?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
An explanation for the behavior of the California State Legislature. I though they were just insane, who would have thought they have parasites eating their brains?
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
The worm had a person wrapped around it.
rewriting history since 2109
I though they were just insane, who would have thought they have parasites eating their brains?
The brains were gone long ago.
It's been all parasite for about a decade now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This story makes it sound like you're in the burbs. Sunnyvale is a city in the heart of Silicon Valley. It borders both Cupertino (home of Apple) and Mountain View (home of Google) and has more residents than both of those put together. Would you read a story on slashdot relating how Cupertino is a town 45 miles from San Francisco?
Weird.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Rack City is Vegas (which is not in CA, in case you did not know)
In the United States, everyone -- insured or not -- is one major hospitalization away from total life-ruining bankruptcy. It's the health care system here that needs help. Brain parasites would be eradicated as a pleasant secondary effect.
Slow news day? 386 cases out of 38,000,000 people? Clearly a serious problem. I'd have to do the math, but I think you're more likely to be hit by a space rock or eaten by a shark.
Budgeting for health care means focusing the available resources on the most cost effective problems first -- the things that affect the most people.
The CDC estimates that there are 1,900 diagnosed cases every year, 386 annual cases in California alone which can cost upwards of $66,000. Often it is paid through Medicare - costing taxpayers thousands.
California Population: 37m
The phrase "upwards of" jumps out at me. Let's be generous and assume the number they quoted is only twice the average.
386 cases at $33,000 = $13m per year
The cost per Californian is under $0.50 per year. Given the weasel phrase, "upwards of", it is probably a lot less than $0.50 per year. You have a one in 100,000 chance of getting it each year in California. If you are a California resident, you are less likely to get hit by lightning, but not by a whole lot.
Health care resources are limited. If we waste them on 1:100,000 shots, people with more common ailments will suffer. That is a bad economics and socially heartless.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Some idiot "researcher" will put out a study that condemns CA and/or the U.S. for not having adequate systems/procedures/etc. in place to detect and treat this even though it is not native to the U.S. and is largely brought in by immigrants.
Therefore, this condition cannot occur in the US, so detection and treatment are of no use.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
All the way across the country from Dr House.
This was the series pilot subject disease.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
The people who think "immigrants" are the problem are idiots, because it doesn't take "immigrants" to introduce such problems. Merely travellers and/or imported pigs or pork, followed by people improperly cooking it and/or unsanitary conditions when preparing food. This can happen anywhere and to anyone. You can travel to another country and bring it home with you to spread around the community. Unless you're going to ban international travel and trade, you have to have a healthcare system prepared to deal with unusual imported diseases like this.
And if you think it's "not native", neither was West Nile Virus, until it became established and now is found across most of the US. Diseases do change their distribution.
Darn immigrants, bringing in their tapeworms and stealing our jobs! Why, it's so bad now that they'll wait for you outside of where you work, beat you up, and STEAL your job! (http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=walmart).
We, as a collective America (the country, not the continent), need to put our foot down and tell them to Get Off Our Lawn (the grassy parts of America, which probably excludes Texas).
[/sarcasm]
Pretty sure that was an intentional, somewhat jestful dig at bologne research and the public reaction to it. But wtf? someone modded that insightful? That's the person you should really be worried about
Effectiveness of dried Carica papaya seeds against human intestinal parasitosis: a pilot study.: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17472487
even though it is not native to the U.S. and is largely brought in by immigrants.
The article, which was mostly fluff, does not state that. Tapeworms most definitely exist in the US as well. In fact they are very common. Perhaps you can cite your source.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
They have to go back and forth on the diagnosis to give House's romantic back-story time to run its course. So blame the English
I know this is Slashdot, and reading the article is blasphemy, but if you'd read the article in its entirety, you'd know that the symptoms of this particular kind of infection can go on for decades before it reaches the point where surgery is necessary, and that the woman in question went to a doctor with these symptoms 25 years ago and was given tylenol. The article goes on to say that if it's caught early, it can be treated effectively and cheaply with steroid drugs.
The problem isn't having inadequate systems in place, it's not having proper education about this kind of thing. When the cost rises so dramatically if it's left to stew for so long, it becomes cost effective to educate people and doctors about the risks and symptoms, especially when the majority of those affected will be on medicaid, and the US taxpayer will have to foot the bill for brain surgery in the most inefficient and expensive health care system in the world (medicaid itself spends about twice per patient what gets spent in countries like Canada or the UK). Given all the other drug ads you see on US television, you'd think the steroid manufacturers would be doing the education for the health authorities.....
It can't hurt right?
Serious medical crisis aside, all I can picture in my head right now is Paul Ryan wearing a brain slug from Futurama, "Poor little guy starved to death"
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
I am from Georgia, and had a tapeworm when I was about 7 or so. And, yes, I was going barefoot a lot that summer.
Frustratingly, it seems there've been a lot of reports that point to lack of parasites (and exposure to other things as well) as being behind a lot of Americans' immunological deficiencies. But then of course as this article points out, having big cysts in your brain isn't all parades and root beer floats, either. We really need more research on how to trigger our immune systems properly without being endangered by actual meat-eating, egg-laying worms in our systems. Here's a link to one bit of research that mentions this. Apologies that I don't have the patience to learn how Slashdot wants me to alias it: http://www.msrc.co.uk/index.cfm/fuseaction/show/pageid/2474
Actually, if you read the story, it is not known where she acquired the parasite, and California, by virtue of its large immigrant population, has a bigger share of the problem (at least as it is known right now) than other states.
My comment had nothing to do with where the woman acquired the parasite or what her ethnic heritage is, and was more of a comment on the poor state of everything in California. I was suggesting that the reason almost everything is so screwed up in California is that maybe there's a much larger prevalence of these brain parasites (causing people to do dumb things) than authorities know about.
Jokes and sarcastic comments are never as funny when you have to explain them.
Are you in California?
It's the same things a Texas being condemned for a low graduation rate without recognizing the huge number of illegals that can't speak English and don't stick around long enough to graduate.
On the other hand, people from Texas do tend to be morons...
Hey! I resemble that remark, you insensitive clod!
In the late 1980s she complained to American doctors of a pain so absolute it blinded her and made her vomit.
They gave her Tylenol.
And that's why i avoid all facets of the USA medical system like the plague.
But if we run the immigrants off our lawns, how will they mow them?
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property; A Corporation is the legal fiction that property is a person.
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.
Give them the tools first, then chase them around in a regular pattern that starts from your door, covers the whole lawn and ends at the gate.
An outbreak of brain parasites would explain just about everything that happens in Sacramento
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