More than 100 larval capsules of pork tapeworm (pork tapeworm) have been found in the brain of an unnamed 8-year-old Indian woman.
This is a very dangerous worm, which most often can be infected by eating poorly roasted pork, or simply forgetting to wash your hands or eating an unwashed apple.
Despite its name, the final owner of the pork tapeworm is a person, in whose body the worm can cause various diseases, depending on whether an adult has settled there or larval.
An Indian girl was diagnosed with the larval stage, the so-called cysticercosis, and since it was found in the brain, neurocysticercosis.
It all started with the fact that the girl began to suffer from epileptic seizures and the doctors could not understand their cause for a long time. The child was diagnosed with a brain cyst and was given large doses of steroid-containing drugs.
They did not help with epilepsy, but the girl began to gain a lot of weight. In six months, she recovered from 40 kg to 60 kg and, due to her excess weight, could already hardly walk. The press does not even publish her photographs, for fear of harming the child.
The girl's desperate parents finally decided to see other doctors and took the child to the hospital in Gurgaon, Haryana state. There, doctors finally identified the real cause of epilepsy - more than 100 cysticercus (larval capsules) of a parasitic tapeworm worm were found in the girl's brain.
The girl was prescribed the correct drugs, which killed the larvae in her brain, and her epileptic seizures stopped. She also began to lose weight and can now walk again.
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According to Dr. Pravin Gupta, in fact, this situation did not surprise him at all. He says that tapeworm infection of the brain is actually not that rare, but more often than not, people just don't know anything about it. Infection causes headaches, seizures, deterioration of health, and people think that the reason is completely different.
The brain of a deceased person with neurocysticercosis. Illustrative photo.