Rosemary Alvarez, an American from Arizona, recently came to the clinic with complaints of numbness in her arm and loss of vision. The prescribed magnetic resonance imaging showed the presence of problems in the brain stem.
Soon the woman was successfully operated on. True, instead of a tumor, which was a complete surprise to the surgeons, they removed the worm from her head! Dr. Nakaji, who performed the operation, admits that at first he even got scared when he saw a wiggling ball in his brain.
Operating room shock
It's hard to believe, but, nevertheless, there really are parasitic worms living in the human head. And although today this disease has become rare, in ancient times entire countries and peoples suffered from it. The ancient chronicles are literally replete with descriptions of craniotomy, during which the ancient aesculapians extracted terrible wriggling parasites from the brains of sick people.
It's pretty easy to catch them today. Just by patting your beloved dog on the withers, you can, without any problems, become infected with toxocariasis, which in severe cases threatens with inevitable blindness. Veterinarians have found that the intestinal parasite of dogs, the nematode worm Toxocara canis, which, as was previously thought, can only be caught by humans from dog feces, is found in abundance on dog hair.
Penetrating into the human body, the worm develops in the back of the eye, causing visual impairment and, sometimes, blindness. One gram of sick dogs' hair can contain up to 180 worm eggs, a quarter of which will give viable offspring. They are very sticky and easily cling to the hands of the petting dog.
Another dangerous parasite that "loves" to settle in human heads is echinococcus. In June 2008, in Shymkent, Kazakhstan, doctors at the regional children's hospital rescued a 10-year-old boy from imminent death, whose brain was literally teeming with worms.
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A small patient in serious condition was taken from the Tyulkubassky district of the South Kazakhstan region. An urgent operation was scheduled. And as soon as the surgeon started working on it, he experienced a real shock. Such, as the neurosurgeon Timur Begmanov later said, he had seen for the first time in his medical practice.
“Echinococcus is not uncommon, but this is the first time I see it,” the doctor said. - Half of the brain was inhabited by worms! The operation took a very long time, more than 20 parasites were removed by the surgeons”.
According to Timur Begmanov, infection with echinococcus occurs due to the consumption of raw, not completely cooked meat. Children do not follow food hygiene, and their parents do not follow this. Echinococcus is especially dangerous for kebab lovers, the meat of which can be poorly fried.
Doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota had to deal with a similar case. According to the patient of the clinic, Dona Bessera, the worm or its larvae entered her body three years ago, when, while vacationing in Mexico, she ate tacos - Mexican tacos with minced pork. In any case, it was after this that she fell ill and lay in bed for three weeks. Later, the woman felt that something terrible was happening to her head. She even had epileptic seizures.
The operation to extract the worm from the brain lasted six hours. All this time, the woman was conscious, and doctors used acupuncture and light anesthesia to relieve pain. This was necessary, since the surgeons touched a very sensitive part of the brain and during the operation constantly talked to Bessera to make sure that vital areas were not disturbed.
When the parasite was discovered, it turned out that it was dead and had already begun to decompose.
Terrible Creeping Thread
However, even if you stop petting dogs and eating poorly cooked pork and beef, the worms will still find a way to get into your brain! How? You will not believe - with the help of ordinary mosquitoes!
“For a year a resident of Ulyanovsk turned to surgeons about a small bump on her head. Of particular concern to the woman was the fact that the tumor-like formation under the skin traveled - from the back of the head to the temple, and then to the forehead."
“In the end, the top layer of skin peeled off the lump and a long (seven centimeters), thread-thick worm emerged free. The "troublemaker" turned out to be dirofilaritis repens, which in translation means a terrible creeping thread."
“This parasite usually lives in the intestines of dogs. Mosquitoes, having sucked dog blood, spread the larvae, which, once in the blood of other animals or humans, can take root there, says parasitologist Maria Kovtanyuk. - Once in the human bloodstream, the larva begins to grow. This lasts from several months to two to three years. During this time, dirofilaria can reach 40 centimeters in length."
The habitat of dirofilariasis repens is the southern regions: Astrakhan, Volgograd, Saratov regions. However, due to the warming of the climate, the zone of distribution of the parasite is constantly expanding.
Not so long ago, a terrible worm appeared in the Kursk region, where he "got acquainted" closely with one of the residents of the city of Kurchatov. On examination at the Kursk Regional Eye Microsurgery Clinic, the woman had a seemingly "normal" conjunctival edema. But under it was a white ball, which … was moving! The patient was sent for surgery. When the seal was opened, a worm crawled out.
“He was white, thick, about 3 millimeters in diameter, and long, about 10 centimeters,” recalls one of the ophthalmologists.
Experts have studied the worm for a long time and came to the conclusion that this is the already familiar dirofilaria. The woman later remembered that she worked in the country. There were many mosquitoes, and dogs were running nearby …