A woman relieved after suspicion of a brain tumor turns out to be a tapeworm egg

You would not expect the discovery of a tapeworm egg in your brain to be considered as good news, but this is the case of New York resident Rachel Palma last fall. This was because the larva found inside was the real cause of Palma's worsening symptoms of insomnia and hallucinations, rather than a brain tumor that her doctors had initially suspected. Once the egg has been removed, its health is restored.

The story of Palma, reported Thursday by the Washington Post, has all the hallmarks of a tale that you will find in a horror anthology particularly horrible to children.

What began as a sleeping difficulty for Palma, insomnia or nightmares, degenerated into hallucinations awakened. Last January, she was more and more disoriented and unable to remember things. Finally, doctors first diagnosed brain cancer in Palma after finding a lesion on his MRI. But when they operated on it last September to remove the supposed tumor, they instead found a ball-shaped mucus-shaped cyst. And once they opened the cyst, they found a tapeworm larva.

"We all said," What is it? "Jonathan Rasouli, a neurosurgery resident at Icahn Medical School on Mount Sinai, told the Washington Post. "It was very shocking. We scratched our heads, surprised to see what it looked like.

The real Palma disease called neurocysticercosis, a rare and complicated brain infection caused by pork tapeworm. Taenia Solium.

This worm can make us physically sick in two ways. We can catch an infection of undercooked pig contaminated with cysts containing larvae; cysts travel in our small intestines, where they reach maturity to become adults over 25 feet long, which mate and seed our poo with a new batch of eggs. These infections can cause generally mild gastrointestinal symptoms such as stomach pain, diarrhea and weight loss, although many people may never feel anything.

But human hosts can also be a stalemate for the worm's life cycle. The new eggs must find their place in the pigs to repeat the steps above, otherwise they will never become adults. If they infect another person, for example by eating food handled by a person who has not washed their hands, the eggs grow in their cyst-covered form, but then remain stuck there forever. To add a touch of black humor, you can also reinfect yourself with the stunted tapeworm eggs that you have helped to give birth to.

This arrested development can still be dangerous for us because the cysts can end up in the bloodstream via the intestine and get to the brain or other vulnerable areas. From there, the larvae – usually after death – can trigger a mbadive immune response that damages the surrounding tissues. But these complications can take years to manifest after the initial infection.

Compared to the dark prognosis of most brain cancers, neurocysticercosis is usually much more manageable if it is detected early, although treatment may vary depending on the location and number of cysts detected. Nevertheless, according to the centers of control and prevention of diseases, nearly 10% of the people hospitalized for this disease die. Fortunately, in the case of Palma, after the doctors had removed the tapeworm, her symptoms had largely disappeared.

"The best part of my story is that it ends well," she told the post office.

Although neurocysticercosis is relatively rare in the United States, it is the most commonly reported brainworm infection in endemic areas such as Latin America, Africa, and Asia, as well as a frequent cause of convulsions. And cysticercosis in general is considered by the CDC as one of five neglected parasitic infections, which means that it also deserves greater attention from public health in the United States.