guess I'll go eat worms

By jp 30 Apr 2001

went and sat in on Dr. Pfefferkorn’s parasite lecture this morning. oooooh boy. highlights included:

• A cyst of larval pork tapeworms that had somehow made it into this guy’s head, and encysted in his brain. the cyst was so huge that when they finally opened the skull a little bit, it exploded open. the cyst was about 2/3 the size of the brain, you can imagine all that crammed into the skull
  
• A bunch of encysted guy tissue that was digested with proteinases(the cysts are resistant) to leave ~30 large, spherical pearls, all teeming with worm larvae.
  
• The fact that the fish tape worms don’t exclude additional parasites from the gut, allowing for one individual to have over a kilometer of worms that came out of his pooper.