Doctors have warned the public about the risks of eating raw meat and drinking tap water after parasitic tapeworms were found in a woman’s spine.
The woman, in her 30s, who often ate sashimi and drank tap water, began experiencing severe back pain and partial paralysis in her legs, the Chinese-language Apple Daily reported.
When the woman’s symptoms worsened, she sought treatment at the Kaohsiung Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, where doctors performed a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan.
Lin Tsu-kung (林祖功), head of the hospital’s Department of Neurology, was quoted by the Apple Daily as saying that the MRI scan showed long irregular shapes in the woman’s lumbar spine, spreading across five vertebrae.
“We saw [her spine] was filled with objects of irregular shapes, but it was not until we operated that we discovered the objects were still moving,” he said, adding that they were shocked to discover sparganosis — a parasitic infection caused by the larvae of tapeworms.
The larvae, with the longest being about 20cm, were removed from the woman’s spine and taken to the hospital’s Department of Pathology for examination.
Lin said the woman was in the habit of drinking tap water and often ate raw tilapia, so the larvae likely entered her body orally and made their way into her spine where they damaged her nervous system, causing back pain, partial paralysis in her legs and urinary dysfunction.
Lin Jui-wei (林瑞偉), a physician at the Department of Pathology, was quoted by the Apple Daily as saying that sparganosis is caused by the larvae of a type of parasitic tapeworm that can grow up to 10m in the human body, adding that its larvae can grow up to 30cm.
While the definitive hosts for this type of tapeworm are dogs and cats, its larvae can live in fish, snakes and humans for many years, the Apple Daily said.
Lin Jui-wei said that although the tapeworm larvae were removed, the damage to the woman’s nervous system might be permanent.
Lin Tsu-kung said people can prevent sparganosis by boiling tap or mountain spring water before drinking it and avoid eating raw meat.
Additional reporting by staff writer
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