Its not a snake. Its a roundworm that infect snakes usually.
A neurosurgeon in Australia pulled a wriggling 3-inch roundworm from the brain of a 64-year-old woman last year—which was quite the surprise to the woman’s team of doctors and infectious disease experts, who had spent over a year trying to identify the cause of her recurring and varied symptoms.
the roundworm was one known to infect snakes—specifically carpet pythons endemic to the area where the woman lived—as well as the pythons’ mammalian prey
One thingI hate about doctors sometimes is that even when they dont know what is causing your illness they still give u some medication anyway. Read this:
She was diagnosed with an unexplained case of pneumonia and given a corticosteroid, prednisolone.
Fast forward towhemn they figured out her condition:
The prednisolone, an immunosuppressive drug, may have inadvertently helped the worm migrate and get into the central nervous system.
Its ok to make mistakes but if there is disease u don’t understand and u know u don’t understand, why give medication that maybe helpful or harmful instead of saying “I don’t know”.
Because doctors are only human, and they're doing the best they can with what tools they have and what they know. If someone comes in with all the symptoms of X disease, you're going to treat them for X disease instead of straightaway concluding that they have a worm living in their brain that has never before been seen in humans and treating them with medicine we usually give to horses to get rid of parasites.
My extensive medical research from the show House has shown me that it's because they need to rule out what it's not before they can rule out what it is
Sometimes you do not have the luxury of waiting to treat until you have all information. In general a short course of steroids is extremely safe. Additionally, steroids are correct to give in CNS helminth infections anyways, although usually it is dexamethasone, not prednisolone. More likely the mycophenolate was the immunosuppressant that let it get into the brain not the steroid.
More importantly, they did quite a bit of workup, including bronchoscopy with BAL, which indicated she likely had a form of eosinophilic pneumonia, probably Churg-Strauss syndrome. Steroids and immunosuppressants are the standard of care for this, and it is a severe disease if not treated.
This is something that has never occured before in known medicine, so to expect them to have figured it out entirely before initiating a treatment is unreasonable. Her initial symptoms were in January of 2021, final diagnosis was made mid 2022. Would you expect your doctor to hold off on any treatment for a year and a half?
Do you think it makes sense to run all kinds of tests and scans whenever someone comes in with a headache? It’s often impossible to be certain about the underlying illness so doctors have to make educates guesses. If it’s probably a mundane problem, they’re not going to continue digging just in case the patient might have a never-seen-before worm in their brain.
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