Health

Woman Survives Brain Worm

MyFOXPhilly.com
MyFoxPhilly.com
MyFoxPhilly.com
MyFoxPhilly.com
MyFoxPhilly.com
MyFoxPhilly.com
MyFoxPhilly.com

Last year, Rosemary Alvarez, who lives in the Phoenix, Arizona-area, started experiencing numbness in her arm and blurred vision. She went to the emergency room twice and had a cat scan, but everything came up clear.
Then doctors looked at an MRI and realized something wasn't right. "Once we saw the MRI we realized this is something not good," neurosurgeon, Dr. Peter Nakaji told MyFoxPhoenix.com. "It's something down in her brain stem, which is as deep in the brain as you can be."
Expecting to remove a tumor, Nakaji and his colleagues found a worm inside of Alvarez's brain. The National Institutes of Health reports that 10 percent of all emergency room seizure cases in hospitals in the Southwest are caused by worms in the brain, MyFoxPhily.com reported.
On a video of the surgery, Nakaji can be heard chuckling after he made the discovery. "I'm sure this is a very strange response for the people in the operating room," he said. "But because I was so pleased to know that it wasn't going to be something terrible."
Dr. Mike Cirigliano, was a guest on WTXF 29 and discussed Alvarez's case. He brought along this stock photo of "a typical worm."
If a person eats undercooked pork that is infected with cysticercosis, they too can become infected with a tapeworm, which is called taenia solium, MyFoxPhilly reported. The tapeworm will lay thousands of microscopic eggs in their stomach, which are released every single time the person goes to the bathroom. If the person does not wash their hands after going to the bathroom, they will pass the infection on to another person. So if so they don't wash their hands well after using the bathroom, they spread to unsuspecting victims.
Nakaji does not believe Alvarez will have any long-lasting health problems due to the brain worm, although he is unsure how long she was living with the organism. He said it could have been three years or several weeks before he removed it. Alvarez has learned one lesson from all of this: "Wash your hands," she said. Visit MyFoxPhilly.com for more pictures.