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Hawaii warns tourists of parasitic worm that can burrow into human brains
- b_tterc_p 7y agoI want to highlight that the symptoms section was subtitled “All in your head”.
- Ultramanoid 7y agoThis article is written by Ars Technica's Beth Mole. Her writing style is well-known by now. ( And much appreciated. )
- ilaksh 7y agoIt seems like this could be prevented by cooking fruits and vegetables. I always knew salads weren't really healthy! On a serious note, I may actually avoid salads and try to find a way to cook fruit quickly instead of eating it raw.
- Ultramanoid 7y agoOfficials noted that a person in one of the latest confirmed cases became infected in December of 2018 after purposely swallowing a slug on a dare. Leave it to human stupidity to always find a way.
- CRUDite 7y agoThere was a widely reported and tragic story of a young man doing the same thing in Australia some years ago (Sam Ballard). I would have to assume his fate was unknown to the current patient.
- nkrisc 7y agoI never heard of him nor these specific parasites but I remember learning in school that snails and slugs are hosts for many kinds of parasites. Which is why I would nor eat one, especially uncooked.
- t0mbstone 7y agoI wonder how many parasites Bear Grylls has? He always seemed to enjoy eating slugs and bugs in his Man Vs. Wild show.
- tinus_hn 7y agohttps://www.looper.com/32135/reasons-man-vs-wild-totally-fake/ https://www.looper.com/32135/reasons-man-vs-wild-totally-fak... It’s the magic of tv.
- caughtTheAutism 7y agoFuck. It's this kind of shit that really fucks up the whole theoretical fecal/oral transplant for microbiome innoculation from the free range kid raising method of autism prevention. If you let kids just be dirty little kids that eat mud pies so they don't catch the autism, now they end up with rat lungworm infestations in their god damned brains. Ain't no happiness nowhere.
- budhajeewa 7y agoWho else read the title "Huawei", and wondered why they'd warn about such thing?
- bradleyhb 7y agoYep, interesting phenomenon.
- Fjolsvith 7y agoDyslexics of the world, untie!
- budhajeewa 7y agoCan dyslexia be occurring only once in a while?
- Fjolsvith 7y agoYes, mine is infrequent but usually hits with numbers.
- budhajeewa 7y agoMust be because of the recent news, and expecting HN to carry "hacker" news, instead of biology news. :D
- Katzenjammer 7y agoWhat an unusual life cycle. Taking up residence in the lungs of a warm creature before moving to a cold creature in hopes of winding up in a warm creature again, where it climbs up into the brain of all places for childhood. What's the advantage of that? Hiding out from the immune system?
- qually 7y ago@Katzenjammer, I have to think it's a combination of signaling, timing and specific available nutrients (mammals and mollusks only) and biomass. It's even weirder, because the lungs cough up, eat, swallow, poop the eggs. Snails eat rat poop, and then hatch the eggs and poop larva in their slime. Rats eat the snails and the larva infest and follow the nerves up the spine. Once sexual maturity is reach they go to the lungs to spawn and die. The distance is too far in humans, so they actually only have enough time as sexually mature adults to cross the distance of a rat's body. When they die inside a human, they've spent too much time and traveled the distance of longer than more than one rat's body.
- SenHeng 7y agothe wandering worm primarily takes up residence in rats’ lungs, where female worms lay their eggs. Young worms leave the nest early to find their own windy homes, though. Larvae get coughed up into rats’ throats then swallowed. The hosting rat eventually poops out the young parasites, which then get gobbled up by feces-feasting snails and slugs (intermediate hosts). When other rodents come along and eat those infected mollusks, the prepubescent parasites migrate to the rats’ brains to mature before settling into the lungs and reproducing. The cycle then starts again 1. rat lung 2. rat throat 3. rat stomach 4. rat poop 5. slugs 6. rat brains 7. rat lung 8. GOTO 1 It never ceases to amaze me, the life cycle of a parasite. So that's 7 steps with wildly varying probabilities of success. That it actually works is mind blowing.
- oceanghost 7y agoYou've got one line extra in your little program :)
- Mbaqanga 7y agoI remember watching one of those emergency room shows years back. Three guys go in for swelling in the brain, due to the rat worm. Their conditions got worse, until they administered immunosuppressants, as the doctors assumed that their immune system was reacting to the dead worms. Apparently when they die in a hosts brain, they release antigens. Toxic I think.