- This woman was lucky her worm-infected brain was easily treatable.
Reading a story about creepy crawlies and parasites usually makes you feel a little itchy. This one might require you to go lie in a fetal position under the shower for a while.
A Filipino woman went to see a doctor after experiencing a bizarre, sudden seizure. Her condition left the medical professionals scratching their heads as their initial tests showed she was alright.
Then came the MRI scan of her brain. It showed an unusual out-of-place cluster embedded in her brain matter.
Was it a tumor? Or did the woman have some kind of parasitic infection going?
The doctors suspected the woman might be carrying blood flukes, an insidious parasitic worm. Testing for the infection is unreliable, but in this woman’s case, the results were crystal clear.
After squirting her blood onto lab-grown eggs, they immediately grew a “tail” of reactive substances. The gross reaction proved that the woman was infected.
The story has a happy end, though. Medication quickly got rid of the parasites, and the mass in her brain vanished with them.
Mysterious Seizure
Our unfortunate heroine is an unidentified woman working as a rice farmer in the Philippines. Her bizarre medical case was recently detailed in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Some time ago, the otherwise healthy woman suddenly experienced a major seizure of some sort. She was completely fine one moment, but the next she couldn’t control the right side of her body.
Her right arm and leg began shuddering and shaking without her being able to stop them. But perhaps the strangest thing was that she felt no other symptoms: no headache, weakness, fainting, blurred vision, or anything else.
That sure sounds more than a little terrifying. The woman thought so too and immediately sought medical attention.
Something in the Brain
After arriving at the hospital, though, she initially received possibly the worst news someone in her situation would. According to the doctors, she should’ve been completely healthy.
A physical and X-ray examination revealed nothing out of the ordinary. However, due to the nature of her symptoms, the doctors couldn’t just leave the testing there and sent the woman to a brain MRI.
It’s good that they did. The scan showed that the woman was carrying something she shouldn’t in her brain.
In the middle of the gray-colored brain matter of her left frontal lobe, the picture showed a brightly glowing cluster of lumps or nodules. The only question was what they were – a tumor or eggs of some kind?
The Telltale Tail
The doctors’ experienced eyes quickly saw details that looked suspiciously like a blood fluke infection. These parasitic worms are fairly common in eastern and southeastern Asia.
Unfortunately, the worms can be very difficult to detect due to their insidious life cycle. The female blood fluke lives in a special pouch on the male’s body. The adult pairs can travel through a person’s veins and organs without a trace.
Problems only start occurring when the worms multiply, and their eggs start clustering in organs, like the doctors suspected had happened in the woman’s case. However, blood flukes don’t usually end up in the brain, and there wasn’t really a feasible way to open the woman’s skull and check if the worrying mass was made of worm eggs.
There is a test to see whether a person carries blood flukes, though. If their blood is added over blood fluke eggs from another source, the eggs will develop a tail-like structure of antibodies from the infected blood.
However, the test is unreliable as the reaction doesn’t always occur. Nonetheless, the doctors decided to give it a try.
Full of Worms
In this case, there was no question about the test’s accuracy. As soon as the woman’s blood contacted the sample blood fluke eggs, they grew dangling “tails.”
With that, the woman’s infection was all but confirmed. But just to make sure, the doctors asked the woman for a stool sample.
That test only highlighted how bad her infection was. In a gram of the woman’s stool (0.03 ounces) were more than 190 eggs.
Fortunately, a blood fluke infection is highly treatable. The doctors sent the woman home with anti-parasitic, anti-inflammatory, and anti-seizure medications.
Three months later, the woman hadn’t had a single seizure. A follow-up MRI scan also showed that her brain was now delightfully worm-free.
Not grossed out enough? Go read this list of 7 Weird (and Horrible) Human Parasites.