Man ate raw bacon for years, then Florida doctors find worms in his brain. ‘Very rare’
A man walked into an Orlando hospital after his migraine medication stopped working for his excruciating headaches.
The 52-year-old had suffered from migraines for years and had mostly been able to keep them under control with medication, according to a case report published in the American Journal of Case Reports on March 7.
But over the past four months, his headaches had gotten worse, and nothing seemed to be helping, he told doctors.
His doctors started to take a medical history.
Aside from his headaches, the man had Type 2 diabetes, complicated by nerve damage, high cholesterol and was obese, according to the case report.
The pain from his head had increased, but he didn’t report any other neurological symptoms like seizures, numbness, muscle weakness or changes to his face, the doctors said.
He hadn’t traveled recently, only taking a cruise to the Bahamas two years earlier, and he said he didn’t eat anything out of the ordinary on the trip, the case report said.
However, he told doctors he had spent most of his life eating “lightly cooked” or “non-crispy” bacon.
He was taken for a brain scan, where doctors found multiple cystic foci, or small cysts, deep inside his brain tissue, a scan in the case report shows.
They were on both sides of his brain, so he was “urgently” transferred to a neurologist for a closer look.
There was swelling around the cysts, the neurology team noted, so doctors believed the growths were from an external source, and they called in an infectious disease expert.
A blood panel ruled out HIV and RPR, rapid plasma reagin or syphilis; then ruled out cryptococcus, a fungal infection; and toxoplasmosis, a parasite commonly spread to humans through cat feces.
One last test, for cysticercosis, was completed — and it came back positive.
He had tapeworms in his brain.
“Cysticercosis is a disease that has left a large impact on humanity in history as distant as ancient Greece,” the doctors wrote in the case report. “To them, the connection between cysticercosis and pork consumption was plain, and pigs and swine were viewed as impure or unclean throughout the ancient world.”
Cysticercosis occurs when the larvae of the parasite Taenia solium enters the body, typically from a human ingesting “water or food contaminated with tapeworm cysts,” the doctors said.
The parasite most commonly lives in pigs, meaning most people who become infected either drank water that pigs had defecated in, or ate raw or undercooked pork.
But the Florida man’s case was different.
“Our patient’s lifelong preference for soft bacon may have led to instances of undercooked bacon consumption, but this would have caused him to develop taeniasis, an intestinal tapeworm, and not cysticercosis,” the doctors said.
The doctors suspect, since the parasites somehow traveled from his intestines to his brain, that the man likely infected himself when he failed to properly wash his hands after using the bathroom.
“It is very rare for patients to contract neurocysticercosis outside of the classic exposures or travel, and such cases in the United States were thought to be nonexistent,” the doctors said. “It is historically very unusual to encounter infected pork in the United States, and our case may have public health implications.”
The man was successfully treated with medication, the cysts decreased in size and his migraines subsided, according to the case report.
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