Hidden Epidemic Tapeworms Summary

I choose the article “Hidden Epidemic: Tapeworms Living Inside People’s Brains” by Carl Zimmer. I picked this particular article because I thought it was interesting to learn about the effects tapeworms can have on a person’s brain and the things tapeworms can cause that people do not usually hear about. This relates to the class because we talked about tapeworms and their effects on humans. We also talked about how people get them and how long they can stay in the body.
In maryland, a doctor named Theodore Nash takes on many patients that have tapeworms in their brain. Most of the time tapeworms are found in people’s intestines in their adult stage but before their adult stage they go through a larvae stage. Sometimes the tape worms in their larval stage can get into people’s brains and cause the illness called neurocysticercosis. This illness is easily confused with other brain disorder which has made it hard for doctors to know how many people are affected with neurocysticercosis. At minimum there are 5 million cases of it. The best way to prove a person has neurocysticercosis is the ghostly image of a cyst that can be found in a brain scan and also the presence of the antibodies against tapeworms.
Normally when a person gets tapeworms it comes from an animal then it …show more content…
Luis Ortiz’s illness started off with a headache, confusion and vomiting. After going to the emergency room they found out he had tapeworms cutting off the blood flow in his brain. The doctor had to do surgery to take the worms out. Even with the tapeworms out of his brain he still has memory problems and was forced to drop out of school for a while. This just proves how bad neurocysticercosis is. This article agrees with the other that this disease is hard to detect and is misunderstood by many doctors (Monhey,