Question

This week you have learned about a variety of parasitic organisms. Choose one of these parasites that interests you, and perform an Internet search to find a story of video of one survivor explaining his or her experience with that parasitic infection. Include the link in your post, so it will be available for others who are interested. Then, sumarize what you learned about their experience, and nclude information about how they became infected and how they treated the infection (if applicable).

Answer 1

Let us work with the following video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srFe3nSA4xY

This is a case of cyticercosis, it is a type of tapeworm that, in one life stage it likes to stay at the brain. This tapeworm has 3 stages: the egg stage, in which they are located in water, soil or plants; the cyst stage, after hatching and being ingested it forms cysts in a host (this is the stage seen in the video); and digestive tract parasite stage, this one requires the first host to be eaten by other animal, then the cyst in the tissue is digested and the worm stays in the digestive tract of the predator. This last stage is parasitic too but not life threatening.

The eggs must be ingested in order to acquire this infection, and that normally occurs by ingesting dirty water or dirty vegetable (not meat with cysts, those would give you the intestinal parasite, not the brain cysts), the eggs enter the bloodstream from the intestines without being damaged and then it travels to the brain where it hatches. It starts to grow in the brain tissue which completely damages nervous functions. The first symptoms are tiredness than then turn into seizures, life is easily threatened in this infection. Neurosurgery is required to save the individual's life.

The infected lady managed to get better with a 6 hour succesfull surgery. The extraction of the larvae from her brain was the start of recovery, her brain started to function better after that and finally reached a healthy state, got rid of the seizures.