futurebird, 12 days ago

@sarahtaber

Well at long last this may put me off of the pork... damn.

sarahtaber, 12 days ago

On the rare occasions when people get a parasitic worm infection in the brain, it's usually the pork tapeworm (Taenia solium).

There's a whole Wikipedia entry on it if anybody's interested

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurocysticercosis

sarahtaber, 12 days ago

If you get pork tapeworm from eating undercooked pork, you're eating larvae that are hanging out in the pig's muscle.

They're at the life stage where they're ready to hang out in your guts & grow into full, proper adult tapeworms.

BUT

sarahtaber, 12 days ago

If you get pork tapeworm from dirty water, you more likely swallowed their eggs. Those hatch into the larvae. Pork tapeworm larvae want to hang out in your muscles, not your guts.

Except sometimes they just.... get lost and wind up in your brain instead.

sarahtaber, 12 days ago

"Why do they go to your brain instead of your muscles?"

they're pork tapeworm larvae, they're not navigational geniuses

sarahtaber, 12 days ago

Here's the thing about tapeworm larvae in your brain: they don't eat your brain.

In fact, they don't eat anything.

Tapeworm larvae get there, decide they're gonna stay, and hunker down into a cyst that basically just hibernates forever.

sarahtaber, 12 days ago

A lot of the time, tapeworm cysts in the brain don't do any damage. Or they can cause headaches, seizures, & other problems.

You can also be asymptomatic for a long time, and then have problems down the road. It's a medical crapshoot.

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/taeniasis-cysticercosis

sarahtaber, 12 days ago

Sometimes, "no symptoms for years, then a lot of symptoms" can happen bc your immune system finally found the cyst & killed it.

That's mostly good. But when your immune system's breaking down a worm cyst, that's a lot of local inflammation. It can mess with nearby neurons.

sarahtaber, 12 days ago

What RFK describes sounds roughly like the "asymptomatic for a long time, then my immune system killed it and that caused problems" track.

But per his own report he also had high mercury levels at the time (usually from eating lots of tuna & swordfish).

bedirthan, 12 days ago

@sarahtaber not colloidal mercury?

sarahtaber, 12 days ago

So it's hard to say for sure whether his symptoms came from the neurocysticercosis or from mercury. You'd have to open up the braincase to know for sure and that's "unethical."

Not a fan of his politics. Physically though, it sounds like he's definitely been through a lot.

sarahtaber, 12 days ago

Anyway, this is why public health people are always going "blah blah wash your hands, cook your meat, don't drink sewage."

Tapeworms can mess you up! And a lot of people in rich countries have just forgotten these things can happen to us!

sarahtaber, 12 days ago

Also I want to be clear that I'm not a human doctor. I'm a crop scientist who worked on livestock parasitology for a while. Yes I worked with tapeworms in a lab but they were always from livestock.

sarahtaber, 12 days ago

If you're concerned about brain worms please please PLEASE talk to a real human doctor. I'm a veterinarian for plants, which do not have brains, so this is the full extent of my knowledge on neurology.

sarahtaber, 12 days ago

Bonus for all the worm fans out there: the largest parasitic worm ever found was in a sperm whale in the 1950s off the Kuril Islands.

28' long, 1" diameter (8.4m, 2.5cm)

Human & livestock parasites are gross, but knowing this helps me keep it all in perspective