50 y-o Man Complains Of Headaches, Doctors Find Tapeworm Living Inside His Brain for 4 years

The Huffington Post| By Macrina Cooper-White Email Posted: 11/21/2014 1:04 pm EST 

If you're squeamish, here's a story you might not want to hear.

Doctors in England were having a hard time figuring out what was giving a Chinese man headaches and seizures and causing disturbances in his sense of smell. After the 50-year-old man tested negative for various diseases, a series of brain scans revealed the cause of the strange symptoms -- a tapeworm had been living inside the man's brain for four years. Freaky!

Over the course of four years, the worm
migrated 5 cm from the right side of
 the brain to the left, as shown by the
 cluster of ring-enhancing lesions
 the larvae produced. (Credit: Nagui Antoun.)

The parasite measured about one centimeter in length and had tunneled five centimeters through the man's brain before surgeons removed it in 2012, The Guardian reported. The man is now reportedly cured of the infection. Researchers identified the parasite as a Spirometra erinaceieuropaei, a rare species of tapeworm normally found in China, South Korea, Japan and Thailand. Only 300 cases of infection by the parasite have been reported in humans.

Scientists believe that Spirometra erinaceieuropaei may be contracted by eating crustaceans and reptiles that harbor it, or by using a Chinese remedy for sore eyes that is made from frogs.

"We did not expect to see an infection of this kind in the U.K., but global travel means that unfamiliar parasites do sometimes appear," Dr. Effrossyni Gkrania-Klotsas, a researcher at the department of infectious disease at Addenbrooke's NHS Trust in Cambridge, said in a written statement.

Dr. Effrossyni Gkrania-Klotsas and her colleagues used a sample of the worm tosequence the creature's entire genome for the first time. The results of this research were published online on Nov. 21 in the journal Genome Biology. more