China has a long-standing culture of eating frightening-looking insects, including centipedes. These creatures are also used in traditional Chinese medicine.
But at the same time, no one eats them raw, but undergoes various processing, including drying and making powder from them.
However, one Chinese family fell in love with eating raw millipedes and this brought them to the hospital with an infection with dangerous parasitic worms.
Some time ago, a 78-year-old grandmother came to the clinic in the Pearl River region, whose name is not called in the press. She has been complaining of headaches and drowsiness in the past few weeks.
Doctors were unable to establish the cause of her illness, but a month after her visit, her 46-year-old grandson came to the hospital with similar symptoms. Then the doctors took note of both and first of all found out what they ate.
After the grandmother and her grandson pointed out that they loved to eat raw millipedes bought in the market, doctors found the cause of their illness. It turned out to be a tiny parasitic worm of the species Angiostrongylus cantonensis.
The disease it causes is called Angiostrongylosis. In case of illness, the larvae of the worm infect the brain, causing meningoencephalitis (inflammation of the lining of the brain). The worm usually parasitizes rats.
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A person most often becomes infected with these worms after eating raw or half-baked snails and other molluscs or crabs (intermediate hosts) or without washing vegetables from the garden.
After infection, a person experiences drowsiness, fever, and fever. In severe cases, death is possible.
Fortunately, the doctors were able to cure both the grandmother and her grandson. For this, both were placed in the infectious diseases ward for 3 weeks. Whether other members of their family became ill is not specified.
In the meantime, a research team went to the local market and purchased 20 raw millipedes. The same parasite was found in 7 of them.
