Fox 10 News has a rather gruesome story about the removal of a live parasitic worm from a woman’s brain, which is accompanied by a film clip  containing footage of the surgical procedure.

As the film explains, the woman, who lives in Arizona, first started to experience flu-like symptoms, followed by numbness in her left arm which grew progressively worse. Neurosurgeon Peter Nakaji operated, expecting to find a tumour in the brainstem, but instead found and removed a tapeworm.

It goes on to say that the woman was infected either by eating uncooked pork or unwashed food contaminated with infected human faeces (making this lmost probably a pork tapeworm infection); that this was the sixth such case seen by Nakaji in the past few months; and that this is extremely rare but has started to increase recently.

Horrific as this all sounds, the woman in the film was in fact very fortunate, because if it had been the tapeworm larvae, instead of the worm iteself, which had entered her brain, the consequences of her infection would have been much more severe.

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