- Those of you looking for an excuse to buy a flamethrower; your moment has come.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regularly issues recommendations on how to deal with developing health risks. Typically, those recommendations are what you’d expect.
They might ask you to throw away contaminated food items, maybe get vaccinated, shake people’s hands instead of licking them… You know, doctor stuff.
For an emerging parasitic threat, however, the CDC has issued a different recommended treatment:
We’re not even joking. A parasitic worm is spreading in the country through raccoon feces.
Although the worm infections are rare, their consequences are debilitating or even fatal. Fortunately, raccoons are neat lil’ critters that prefer to poop in specific communal latrines.
So, if you find a raccoon latrine, the official recommendation is to burn it.
Kill it with fire — now that’s practicing medicine.
A Common Raccoon Problem.
But what are these nefarious worms? Well, they’re called Baylisascaris procyonis, and they’re not nice.
B. procyonis is a parasitic roundworm nematode that primarily uses raccoons as its hosts. Its lifecycle is pretty bog-standard for these kinds of worms — they procreate in a raccoon’s intestines, the raccoon poops out the eggs, the eggs mature on the ground, and then the hatched worms get into a new raccoon through its food.
The worms are incredibly common in American raccoons, since a single female worm can squeeze out around 200,000 eggs per day. According to estimates, 90% of juvenile and 70% of adult raccoons carry B. procyonis.
In a raccoon, the worms cause discomfort but don’t harm the animal too much, since they need the raccoon to live. However, the worms can also get into other animals — and humans.
And that’s where things get nasty.
The Wrong Host
So, you’re a B. procyonis and you find yourself in, say, a hare. This is not your ideal environment, but to your wormy mind, it’s a great opportunity.
You know that you want to be inside a raccoon. You also know that raccoons eat dead hares and will even catch live ones that are in poor enough condition.
You just have to make it easier for this unfortunate hare to become raccoon food!
To that end, you worm yourselves into the hare’s brain and start tinkering with it. Meanwhile, your siblings burrow through the hare’s intestinal walls and ensconce themselves in its muscle tissues.
With you playing whack-a-brain in its head, the hare develops serious brain inflammation. If that doesn’t kill it outright it’ll certainly cause the hare to act disoriented, making it an easy catch for a hungry raccoon.
As the raccoon devours the hare’s flesh, your encapsulated siblings make their way into the ideal host. You’re stuck in the brain, so you may not make it — but by your sacrifice, your revolting family lives on.
Rare But Fatal
Now, if B. procyonis gets into a human being, it’ll try to do the same thing. Of course, you’re unlikely to become raccoon food, but the worm still does its nasty business in your brain.
Should a B. procyonis infestation reach your brain, you will begin experiencing rather horrendous symptoms. The infection they cause quickly spreads through your brain, eyes, and central nervous system, causing blindness, difficulty moving or total paralysis, seizures, cognitive impairments, and brain atrophy.
At this stage, there’s very little doctors can do and the most likely outcome for the patient is, sadly, death. Even if they happened to survive, the worms will have caused irreversible nerve and brain damage, and the aforementioned symptoms have become permanent.
As a silver lining, human B. procyonis infections are exceedingly rare. According to the CDC, there were only 29 recorded cases between 1973 and 2015.
The people most at risk are children and those with developmental challenges, who might pick up things outside and stick them into their mouths. That said, unwashed vegetables and such can also spread the worms.
Kill It With Fire
The best way to avoid getting a dose of the worms is, therefore, not eating things contaminated by raccoon feces. However, that can be easier said than done.
You see, B. procyonis eggs are ridiculously resilient. They can survive in a dormant state for years, resist most cleaning chemicals and disinfectants, and can move from surface to surface if they happen to come in contact.
They are vulnerable to only one thing — fire. Well, extreme heat in general, but it’s cooler if you burn them.
You can’t burn all the things, though, so the CDC recommends treating yard tools, like spades and such, with boiling water to kill possible eggs. But what if you find a raccoon toilet?
That’s right, raccoons poop in latrines. For animals that spread worms through their feces and dive in dumpsters, they’re surprisingly fastidious creatures and tend to poop in designated spots.
So, if you find a raccoon toilet, the CDC officially recommends that you burn it. Break out a propane torch (or a flamethrower if you have one) and flame on, turning the latrine’s contents over with a shovel a few times to ensure you kill all the eggs.
Of course, you should always be careful with fire. Don’t use any fire-making tools during a fire hazard and be cautious about the materials above, below, and next to the raccoon latrine.
Still, though. How many times in your life do you get an official recommendation to just burn things to the ground?
