A Singaporean man had no idea he‘d been a victim of a parasitic infection. He’d suffered no symptoms at all, until one day he passed a huge tapeworm.
At over 9 feet, the worm was about one-and-a-half times longer than the man. Doctors had to bend it 18 times to fit it into a picture.
Tapeworm infections are typically caused by eating raw or under-cooked meat. This particular worm’s eggs most resembled those of a fish tapeworm, the hospital’s Department of Microbiology concluded.
Most tapeworms have a two-stage lifecycle that is split between two hosts. In many cases, the lifecycle involves the eggs first entering a primary host—a cow, pig, fish, or even human. The eggs hatch into larvae and migrate into the host’s muscles, where they can form cysts. Some tapeworms can also form a cyst in the brain, which can be very dangerous for the host.
The second stage comes when the primary host—cow, pig, or fish—is killed and eaten raw or under-cooked by humans. The larvae then lodges in the intestines and develops into an adult tapeworm. The worm attaches its head to the intestine and consumes nutrients from the host, growing successive segments to its body that can reach lengths of of 50 feet. Each of the segments contains thousands of eggs, which the secondary host excretes. The eggs get into sewage and can eventually end up in water bodies and the environment in general, thus completing the cycle.
