This parasite, which is part of the tapeworm family, infects humans extremely rarely. Since 1953, only 300 cases have been recorded worldwide.
A man who had come to see his doctor for recurring migraines found that he had been living with a parasite in his brain for four years. Spirometra erinaceieuropaei, that’s its name, is a worm that is normally found in amphibians and crustaceans in China. It can also be found in the abdomen of cats and dogs where it reaches its adult size: 1.50 meters.
Rest assured, the 50-year-old British worm was “only” 1 centimeter tall, and it could not be spotted by surgeons until after a biopsy of a lesion in the patient’s brain. The doctors had hitherto remained perplexed by the circular shape which moved in his brain on the various scans that this man had made in recent years.
This is the first time that such a parasite has been discovered in the UK. Since 1953, only 300 cases have been recorded worldwide. Even in China, where the parasite usually lives, only 1,000 human cases have been recorded since 1882.
The Briton of Chinese origin is said to have caught this parasite during a visit to his native country to which he regularly visits, according to Guardian which relays the published information in the scientific journal Genome Biology. This worm causes tissue inflammation and, if it reaches the brain, memory loss and headaches. The intruder could then be removed from the patient’s brain.
The parasite was then donated to geneticists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge who succeeded in sequencing its genome for the first time, allowing them to study potential treatments. “This worm is a mystery and we don’t know what species it can infect or how,” said Dr Hayley Bennett of the Wellcome Trust team. Humans are an accidental and rare host ”.
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