California's Unspoken Health Problem: Brain Parasites 313
An anonymous reader writes "Sunnyvale, California is a town 40 miles outside of San Francisco, in the Bay Area. As in most of California, the weather is mild, and the winters are short, even sometimes warm. On December 20, Sara Alvarez took her youngest child for a walk in the park in town. As daylight faded, Alvarez lost feeling in her right leg, then her left foot. Her body became numb, and she became weak. At 10:15 pm, her husband drove her to a hospital in Redwood City, about 20 minutes away from their town. There, over the course of Christmas, doctors batted around diagnoses: tumor, cancer. Finally, Alvarez received a brain scan that revealed the truth: neurocysticercosis, a calcified tapeworm in her brain (link contains images of brain surgery)."
Not just Bbbbrrrraaaiiinnnssss!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
As California is a gateway, thanks to its border with Latin America and many international airports (plus a few containers brought to shore filled with asian imigrants, one was found abandoned at sea a few years ago) we gots lots of happy little bugs.
It's not difficult in some corners of the world to buy a false health certification, which allows someone with rampant Tuberculosis to come on in and cough among us. (thanks to this I went on a 9 month course of Isoniazid as a preventative meausre, 9 months of total suck) Further there are people coming from rural backgrounds in SE Asia who have various gut and blood parasites, they move to the big city, get a leg up and move to the US. There's some pretty graphic examples of what peasants could have in their guts in the way of big worms thanks to eating food grown in fields fertilized by raw manure from infected oxen, goats, etc., and walking around in same fields bare footed. A mobile population in the world means this is going to happen more often, everywhere.
Don't like it? Maybe mandatory health screenings for visitors to the US, but if you even start talking about it you'll be called all sorts of names by various groups and who is going to pay for it?
Not just West Nile that's getting around.
Re:Not just Bbbbrrrraaaiiinnnssss!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you got any evidence for this, in terms of research done providing statistics on the percentage of parasites traceable to immigrants, or are you just pointing the finger at these people when you should be looking at shoddy health inspection practices?
Re:"Nobody cares"!?!? (Score:2, Interesting)
Everyone cares and knows about neurocystercicosis. It isn't rare, just uncommon in the U.S. It's the cause for about 50% of the cases of epilepsy outside of the U.S. It's pretty treatable. It's often asymptomatic, and I run into it fairly routinely, though not as much as when I lived in Texas and California. One famous case was of a Hasidic Jewish family that got it. You see, you get the tapeworms from eating undercooked pork, but you get cistercicosis for
oral-fecal contamination from someone who has the worm in their gut. It turns out that this family had a Latino housekeeper who had the worm, and who apparently didn't quite wash her hands enough after using the bathroom
Re:At Some Point... (Score:5, Interesting)
I know this is Slashdot, and reading the article is blasphemy, but if you'd read the article in its entirety, you'd know that the symptoms of this particular kind of infection can go on for decades before it reaches the point where surgery is necessary, and that the woman in question went to a doctor with these symptoms 25 years ago and was given tylenol. The article goes on to say that if it's caught early, it can be treated effectively and cheaply with steroid drugs.
The problem isn't having inadequate systems in place, it's not having proper education about this kind of thing. When the cost rises so dramatically if it's left to stew for so long, it becomes cost effective to educate people and doctors about the risks and symptoms, especially when the majority of those affected will be on medicaid, and the US taxpayer will have to foot the bill for brain surgery in the most inefficient and expensive health care system in the world (medicaid itself spends about twice per patient what gets spent in countries like Canada or the UK). Given all the other drug ads you see on US television, you'd think the steroid manufacturers would be doing the education for the health authorities.....
How hard to avoid taking a dump in a pig pen? (Score:0, Interesting)
Just how hard is it to avoid taking a dump in a pig pen? I don't even know where the nearest one is. If I were to visit somebody's pig farm, and I really had to go badly I'd... ask where the bathroom is? Let's be really generous and say it's a porta-potty. How often does it get tipped over into the pig pen? I mean, you'd have to try to do that.
That's America of course. Not to be racist, put on an air of cultural superiority, or anything but... they must have pigs running around and people taking dumps all over in other parts of the world. No, I don't have to guess that. I've seen pictures of open sewers and livestock running around. Put two and two together, and you've got pigs rooting in human feces. That's enough to complete the cycle.
Now, the next time you have to pay the water and sewer bill, don't complain so much.
Get the sewage off the streets of 3rd world countries and the problem starts fixing itself. According to Wikipedia this is a really hard problem though. OK... it's simple and it's hard at the same time. It's simple because we know how to fix it. It's hard because you have to change whole cultures. When we're done with that, maybe we can convince these other cultures not to spit so much. Once again, not trying to be racist or culturally superior and all... but it's true. Recent immigrants spit. Swallow that, OK? It's nasty, and if it doesn't give us a brain parasite it'll probably give us something else.
Re:This is why we cook our meats (Score:4, Interesting)