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.) |
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