Week 9 and 10

“Somalis in Northern UK suffer from tropical liver parasite. National Heath Service responds: it’s a fluke!”

Almost time to compile the final list of things not catch, but not quite as we are still accepting nominations. Over the past couple of weeks we have encountered the flukes, which may not make you very sick, very often, but you can feel them wriggle occasionally and they are definitely unpleasant to look at.   This liver fluke is ingested and then finds its way from your intestine into your liver where it happily grows into an adult fluke of 2-3 cm and eats its way through your liver.

Should be simple to avoid by not eating anything raw that comes from fresh water-  but that didn’t help the Somalis whose qat (an evergreen plant  from the horn of Africa that grows on dry land and is chewed for inducing both dreaminess and lucidity?) had been watered down and bound in watery vines for shipment to England. The resulting outbreak of liver flukes caused quite a "bother" here.

Yemeni man chewing khat

Here’s another one for those of you who think living in the far north keeps you safe from parasites: 

Echinococcus multilocularis, a tapeworm of little consequence to the rodents and canids that normally pass it back and forth, but take care picking your wild berries in Alaska or the Upper Peninsula. If a fox, wolf or coyote has been, shall we say, indiscrete on your berry patch, you could find yourself in big trouble some ten or twenty years later with a large mass of larval parasites in your liver. Yikes!

cyts of echinococcus from liver

Close cousin of this one is E. granulosa that is, sadly, transmitted by the beloved domestic dog, but only if it feeds on a raw, infected sheep carcass. Very alienesque in its clinical manifestations and impressively fierce under the microscope.

Then, in a bit of a diversion from things not to catch, we are now covering “things not to be caught by” which include, but are not limited to, the cobra in its many forms, the krait (that bites painlessly while you sleep so quite literally you wake up dead (or nearly so), the carpet viper, the widow, funnel web and recluse spiders, box and blue bottle jellyfish, stonefish, and scorpions. If you are sure of the species of snake, and it is available, you can take anti-venom, that is sure to help, unless it doesn’t. If you are sure that it is a box jellyfish, applying vinegar to the stings will help, but won’t if it is the blue bottle. Or do I have that backwards? Let me know and I will be sure to write it down this time. Snake bit in the tropics is a frequent event and may account for 100,000 deaths per year (or more as many never even make it to the health outpost to be counted) with the major risk being agricultural work and not wearing shoes. In the US the major risk factors are being male and intoxicated. Some of you will be relieved by this epidemiology, whereas others might be alarmed? Finally, if you ever doubted the old superstition about bananas on a boat being bad luck….

banana spider