Talk about a wriggly situation.
When a man in Spain went to the hospital with chronic headaches, brain scans showed poorly defined lesions, or tissue where the edges are blurred due to abnormal cell growth.
Doctors believed all signs were pointing to deadly cancer that had spread — until they took a closer look. The good news? He could be cured. The bad news? The real problem would make most people squirm.
After an initial scan, the medical team performed a higher-resolution MRI to determine the location of any tumors.
While no tumors were present, a different kind of specimen was — pork tapeworm larvae.
Published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, the report confirmed the parasitic infection with a blood test specific to Taenia solium, despite the 60-year-old Castellón native having never traveled abroad.
The parasite enters the human body when larval eggs are swallowed, and they burrow into the gut and form fluid-filled cysts.
The eggs can then develop into adult tapeworms in a human’s gut. The process usually takes around 5 to 12 weeks.
The cysts can travel anywhere in the body, and can infiltrate and calcify in soft tissue.
While eating undercooked pork is one way to ingest adult tapeworms, the man’s condition was from ingesting the eggs, which then settled in the brain, a condition called neurocysticercosis.
The parasitic infection of the brain can cause headaches, seizures, dizziness, muscle weakness, trouble speaking and memory issues.
If left untreated, neurocysticercosis can cause life-threatening complications such as intracranial hypertension, or increased pressure inside the skull, and continuous seizures.
While cases are rare in Europe, they’re not entirely unknown, as a similar case occurred in Germany earlier this year.
According to the World Health Organization, around 2.8 million people are infected with Taenia solium yearly, with cases frequently reported in Asia, South America and Eastern Europe.
Treatment can differ depending on the patient, but antiparasitic drugs are often a first-line therapy — as was the case with the Spanish man, who was treated with albendazole and praziquantel.
Other treatments may include anti-inflammatory medication to reduce inflammation, and drugs to manage symptoms of seizures, headaches and pressure inside the skull.
Last year, another case of a pork tapeworm infection went viral when Sam Ghali, an emergency room doctor, shared the seriously disturbing scan on X.
He described it as one of the “most insane X-rays” he’s ever seen, noting that the entire cross-section of the patient’s trunk was riddled with the parasite.
The unidentified patient likely developed the condition after eating raw or undercooked pork infected with the parasite’s larval cysts.
