Updated

Updated · Fox News · Jun 29

Spanish Doctors Find Live Tapeworm Larvae in 60-Year-Old's Brain After Cancer Scare

Updated

Updated · Fox News · Jun 29

Spanish Doctors Find Live Tapeworm Larvae in 60-Year-Old's Brain After Cancer Scare

Q: How did a man who never traveled contract a brain parasite typically found miles away?

He most likely acquired it locally by accidentally ingesting microscopic *Taenia solium* eggs shed by another person, not by traveling or by eating pork itself. Doctors in Spain said the man had never visited an endemic country, but he had spent years on construction sites sharing meals and communal bathrooms with migrant coworkers from regions where the pork tapeworm is common. That makes “cryptic fecal-oral transmission” the leading explanation: if someone carrying the adult intestinal tapeworm contaminated food, hands, surfaces, or bathroom facilities, the eggs could have been passed to him in Spain. That distinction matters. People get intestinal tapeworm infection by eating undercooked pork containing larvae. Neurocysticercosis happens differently: a person swallows the tapeworm’s eggs, usually through fecal contamination, and the larvae then migrate through the body and can form cysts in the brain. Researchers described this as a likely autochthonous case, meaning the infection was acquired locally rather than abroad. Such cases are rare in Western Europe, but they do occur, especially where there is close contact with people from endemic areas. The report’s broader lesson is that doctors should not rule out neurocysticercosis simply because a patient has no travel history; in this case, that assumption initially made the brain lesions look like metastatic cancer instead of a treatable parasitic infection.

3 articles · Updated · Fox News · Jun 29

A 60-year-old man in Castellón, Spain, was found to have live pork tapeworm larvae in his brain after scans first suggested metastatic brain cancer.
Multiple CT lesions looked like spread tumors, but whole-body scans, colonoscopy and specialized imaging found no primary cancer; a detailed MRI then showed fluid-filled cysts, some containing a tapeworm head, and blood tests confirmed neurocysticercosis.
Doctors treated him with albendazole, praziquantel and corticosteroids, and he recovered without complications, according to the case report in CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.
Researchers said he may have swallowed microscopic tapeworm eggs years earlier, possibly through fecal contamination while working with migrants from endemic regions, though the source could not be proven.
The authors said the case shows neurocysticercosis can appear without travel history in non-endemic areas; fewer than 2% of U.S. cases are domestically acquired, and Western Europe recorded only 18 confirmed local cases from 1990 to 2011.