A 26-year-old Chinese resident named Liu suddenly began to suffer from epileptic seizures, which were increasing in frequency.
According to the South China Morning Post, the man lives in Jiangxi province, and when he went to local doctors, nothing strange was found.
However, the seizures became worse and Liu then went to a leading clinic in Nanchang, where they took many different tests, including blood tests. And one of them showed the presence in his body of a parasitic tapeworm of the species Spirometra mansoni.
These worms in the human body usually cause the so-called Sparganosis, which is accompanied by urticaria and the formation of inflammatory processes. Moreover, this is a rather rare and poorly studied disease, over the past 65 years, only 300 cases of sparganosis have been confirmed, and it was mainly the close subspecies of the worm Spirometra erinacei that became the culprit.
Tapeworm larvae from the genus Spirometra become infected by drinking unboiled water from a pond or eating raw meat from frogs, snakes or wild animals that live near bodies of stagnant water.
The penetration of Spirometra mansoni larvae into the human brain is an extremely rare anomaly. The last such case was in 2014, when a 1-centimeter worm was found in the brain of a Briton. But in the case of Liu, things turned out much more serious. When the surgeons performed the operation, they pulled out from his brain a still living and wriggling worm, as much as 10 cm long!
It is believed that Liu became infected when he ate poorly cooked wild meat. As reported in the article, there is a huge problem with the incidence of worms in China.
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In March 2018, surgeons removed a 13-centimeter worm from the woman's body, which had lived in her body for at least 5 years and which the woman had contracted after eating raw frog meat. A year ago, a 13-year-old girl lost consciousness for half an hour, and when she was examined at the hospital, they found a 25-centimeter worm in her brain that had lived in her for at least 6 years.
According to doctors, many Chinese live in regions where water is of poor quality and where people are used to eating poorly cooked amphibian meat or half-cooked fish.