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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!!!
You just don't eat enough old egg salad sandwiches in space gas stations.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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."
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
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.
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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
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.
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.....
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.
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.