It’s not every day that we discover diseases. Some are even too impossible to be true, but they actually happen.
Now a 41-year-old man was killed by tapeworm, called Hymenolepis nana or dwarf tapeworm. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), it’s actually the most common human tapeworm. It affects around 75 million people worldwide, mostly in developing countries.
However, the man’s tapeworm developed cancer while it was living inside his body. Read on in this report from Newser’s staff Rob Quinn on USA Today:
Man killed by his tapeworm’s cancer
(NEWSER) – Centers for Disease Control researchers say it is one of the strangest and most unsettling cases they have ever encountered. The researchers say that scans of a very ill man in Colombia revealed what “looked like cancer, but the tumors were composed of cells that were not human,” NPR reports. The tumors had come from the man’s resident tapeworm, which had developed cancer and somehow spread the disease to its host, according to the scientists, whose study published in the New England Journal of Medicine describes the “invasion of human tissue by abnormal, proliferating, genetically altered tapeworm cells” as a “novel disease mechanism.” Read more…
Both tapeworms and HIV affect millions of people globally, Dr. Atis Muehlenbachs, a staff pathologist at the CDC Infectious Diseases Pathology Branch, told Live Science. It is very possible that some cases are left unrecognized.
The man would not have been killed by tapeworm if he had a strong immune system, so always keep yours in check.
The CDC also notes that this rare case can happen by eating fecally contaminated food or drink, as well as touching your mouth with contaminated hands, and accidentally ingesting contaminated soil or infected arthropod that has gotten into your food. The best thing to do is to make sure you practice proper sanitation, and cook your meals very well.
Another tapeworm case was reported at the same day, but the California man did survive, around 30 minutes away from death.
Image Credit: Man killed by his tapeworm’s cancer – USA Today
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