Doctors suspect that a person has brain cancer. He really was a worm.

False worms

Tape legs can infect people in two ways: through eating lumps in raw meat or swallowing eggs through the stool. The parasites infect the pigs, and when they eat the eggs from the feces, the worms hatch in the pig’s intestines, pass through the intestines, enter the bloodstream, and migrate to various tissues. There, they form round larvae called cysticerci. If a person eats undercooked meat that contains cysticerci, the worms develop into large worms in the person’s intestines and remain there, possibly for years. Meanwhile, infected people are shedding eggs in their feces.

If the eggs spread due to cleanliness and hygiene—in water, food, etc.—and enter the mouth of a person, they do what they do to pigs. These eggs hatch, burrow into the bloodstream, then travel around, entering various tissues, muscles, and organs, including the brain.

When cysticerci enter the central nervous system of a person, it is a disease called neurocysticercosis (NCC), which is the disease that doctors in Spain gave the person. Tests after his MRI revealed that his immune system had produced antibodies Tape legsto confirm the diagnosis.

NCC can be dangerous, causing seizures, severe neurological deficits, cognitive impairment, stroke, and other complications. But it can also be asymptomatic. The severity depends on where the worms settle in the brain. Fortunately for the man, the results were minimal. Doctors gave him two antibiotics and he recovered.

“Our case emphasizes that the absence of a history of travel should not prevent NCC from the differential diagnosis of ring-enhancing brain tumors, even in areas where metastatic cancer is possible,” they concluded. If they had caught the worm sooner, it would have prevented “unnecessary oncologic procedures and enabled faster treatment.”