The woman felt tingling in her legs; It turned out to be a parasitic worm in the back El Mañana de Nuevo Laredo

UNITED STATES .- The woman who entered emergency room in Dijon, France, said she had had trouble riding her horse for three months. His symptoms have only worsened: he suffers from weakness and falls to electric shocks in both legs.

After a series of tests, doctors discover a parasitic worm hidden in his spine.

When the doctors Marine Jacquier and Lionel Piroth of the University Hospital of Dijon performed an MRI of his spine, they found an abnormal lobular mbad in his ninth thoracic vertebra, they wrote together with an image recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Subsequent tests revealed that a tapeworm, Echinococcus granulosus, had caused the woman's symptoms.

When they saw the MRI for the first time, "to be honest, we could not imagine that I would be a loner". He presented the image to the journal to educate doctors about the possibility of this disease, which is rare in France and in the area of ​​the woman's body in which she was found.

Echinococcus mainly cause two diseases in humans: cystic echinococcosis and alveolar echinococcosis. The disease is zoonotic, which means that it is transmitted to humans by animals, in this case dogs, which in turn are infected with ungulates such as cattle or sheep. . According to the World Health Organization, which lists echinococcosis as an unattended tropical disease, more than one million people worldwide are affected by echinococcosis at some point.

But while the disease is certainly unattended It's not just tropical, said Dr. Dominique Vuitton, Professor Emeritus at the University of Franche-Comté and a member of the Center's Collaborating Center. WHO for the prevention and treatment of human echinococcosis. Almost every country in the world has seen cases of the disease, added Vuitton, who was not involved in treating women.

Although it is rare to see Echinococcus in developed countries, the parasite causes disease in up to 10% of cases. the population in endemic countries such as Argentina, Peru and China, according to WHO. In the hyperendemic regions of South America, between 20% and 95% of slaughtered cattle suffer from this disease.

The doctors said that the 35-year-old woman had never traveled abroad, but that she owned a cat. and had a contact with the cattle, which allowed him to know where he could have infected the woman with the worm, but according to Christina Coyle, director of the clinic of tropical medicine at Jacobi hospital and professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine Cats and cattle are false clues, since the disease is typically transmitted to humans by dogs.

Humans can be hosts of parasites when they ingest their eggs, which are present in the feces of an infected dog. , according to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Piroth said that the woman had reported no contact with dogs or had traveled to a region where the disease was endemic, such as Corsica.

"We have no idea of ​​the contamination," he said. Vuitton said that about 65% of lesions (which reveal the location of the worm) develop in the liver, 20% in the lungs and the rest in other places, including the brain, bones and sometimes vertebrae.

Most people with echinococcosis are asymptomatic, Coyle added. When the parasite develops in the liver, cysts tend to grow for many years; in the case of this woman, however, the cyst moved its spine as it grew and caused symptoms.

Magnetic resonance imaging of the woman's back was remarkable for the experts; Piroth said the lesion looked like "a little flower", and Vuitton said the picture was "very, very pretty" because it showed the woman's cyst very clearly.

However, she was "surprised" that the magazine published the doctor's note without requiring a more precise identification of worm species and information about where the woman might have been exposed.

After discovering the woman's cyst, the doctors surgically removed the worm and gave the patient the pest control drug albendazole. Nine months later, the woman had no residual symptoms or signs of recurrence, according to the report.

Vuitton stated that albendazole is the only drug available to treat patients and that nearly 20% of patients who experience it are feeling effects. side effects that may include liver toxicity. The drug should be used in conjunction with the surgery, and even then it is not 100% effective.

According to the WHO, prevention programs focus on the regulation of animal slaughter and deworming of dogs and sheep. the definitive hosts of the disease.