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(Gray News) – In India, a teenager died two weeks after arriving in the emergency, suffering convulsions and pain in the groin, looking confused and swollen in the eye. What turned out to be the symptom of a parasitic brain disease caused by a tapeworm.
The troubling case was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine by two doctors, Nishanth Dev and S. Zafar Abbas, of ESIC Medical College and the hospital located near New Delhi.
According to the doctors, the 18-year-old had a pain in the right groin for at least a week. An MRI revealed "many well-defined cystic lesions" throughout his brain.
He has been diagnosed with neurocysticercosis, which the World Health Organization describes as a "central nervous system tapeworm infection".
Infection usually results from "the consumption of undercooked foods, especially pork, water contaminated with tapeworm eggs or poor hygienic practices".
According to a 2004 article published in the journal Epilepsy Currents and published on the National Biotechnology Center's website, a person acquires a tapeworm by eating raw pork, for example, and lays eggs in his stool.
The eggs leave the person through the stools and are "ingested by faecal-oral contamination" by another person.
When the eggs are ingested and exposed to a person's stomach acids, they hatch and cross the gastrointestinal tract, slipping into the vascular system, moving into critical parts of the body and forming the type of cyst that has afflicted the body. Indian teenager.
In his case, with cysts in the brain and eyes, doctors were not able to apply anti-parasite drugs, which could worsen brain bleeds or cause vision loss.
They used anti-inflammatory drugs and anti-epileptic drugs, but they could not save the teenager.
According to the journal Epilepsy Currents, neurocysticercosis is a leading cause of seizures and epilepsy in developing and growing countries in the United States.
Copyright 2019 Gray Television Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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