What do worm eggs in a man’s brain have to do with President Joe Biden?
No, this isn’t a joke about special counsel Robert Hur’s testimony about the president’s mental readiness before Congress this week, except it’s timely. Instead, it’s based on standards of living and the state of the United States under the 46th president.
According to People magazine, the unidentified Florida man went to a hospital seeking relief from his worsening migraine headaches.
The 52-year-old man, according to an account published in the American Journal of Case Reports, had a “past medical history of migraine headaches, type 2 diabetes mellitus complicated with peripheral neuropathy, hyperlipidemia, and obesity, who presented as an outpatient after a change in his usual migraines over the previous 4 months.”
“The patient stated his migraines now occurred almost weekly, were severe, were worse over his occiput bilaterally, and no longer were responsive to abortive therapy,” wrote the authors, who are with the Orlando Regional Healthcare System and the University of South Florida.
“The patient stated his migraines now occurred almost weekly, were severe, were worse over his occiput bilaterally, and no longer were responsive to abortive therapy.”
After finding a mass in his brain via CT scan that doctors initially thought were “congenital neuroglial cysts,” the man was admitted to the hospital. There, they found via an MRI that the mass was the larvae of a tapeworm.
Tests showed the man had a disease called neurocysticercosis — “a parasitic infection of the brain, most commonly acquired through travel to developing countries in which cysticercosis and taeniasis are endemic,” the doctors wrote.
As for the cause, the man “denied food insecurity and lived at home with his wife and cat in a modern home. On further questioning, the patient denied eating raw or street food but admitted to a habit of eating lightly cooked, non-crispy bacon for most of his life.”
”It is very rare for patients to contract neurocysticercosis outside of classic exposures or travel, and such cases in the United States were thought to be nonexistent,” the doctors said.
It’s true that cases within the United States have typically been rare in the past.
A 2014 study noted that neurocysticercosis was “the most common parasitic infection of the human brain, rendering NCC as one of the most frequent neurological disorders in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. It is also seen in countries with high rates of immigration from endemic areas, such as the United States.” [Emphasis ours.]
The authors noted a previous 2004 study that found the average age of infection “ranged between 24 and 35 years and the vast majority of cases occurred in foreign-born Hispanics. Mexicans represent more than 70% of cases.”
They also noted a case study of “four unrelated families of an Orthodox Jewish community in New York City in 1990–1991” who had the disease — and who obviously wouldn’t be pork eaters.
”In all the exposed households, there was a history of employment of live-in housekeepers who had recently emigrated from Latin American countries. Examination of six housekeepers currently or previously employed in the four case households revealed an active taeniasis in one and a positive serological test result in another,” the study found.
A 2012 study on the disease, meanwhile, stated that “cysticercosis has been considered a neglected infection of poverty in the USA because it disproportionately affects impoverished and under-represented minority populations.”
“NCC cases included in this review were largely concentrated in the southwest United States. Indeed, more than 75% of NCC cases presented in this review came from series from California. Cases from other regions of the country namely Texas, Oregon, Colorado and Illinois were also identified, which underscores the widespread presence of the infection throughout the country.”
In other words, this is typically a disease found in the third world — but that is often brought to our doorstep by either migration from abroad or poor living conditions at home.
Has America gotten worse under President Joe Biden?
Which one is it? It could be No. 1 or No. 2. We’ve seen record numbers of illegal immigrants into the United States as well as food insecurity from both inflation and supply chain issues. (Have we all forgotten the formula shortages of 2022 so quickly, and the role Biden’s Food and Drug Administration played?)
What is clear is that this is abnormally rare — and yet totally representative of America under the current president. Decline is a choice, and we’ve made it. This is just another potential symptom in a body politic that’s obviously ailing.
Whether or not this is an augury of a nascent outbreak of neurocysticercosis from pork is yet to be seen, but given the events of the past three years, it’s impossible to discount this as another “Florida man” story.
