Just a quick reminder that you might want to give that pork chop a few more minutes on the grill.
After posting a troubling scan image of a woman’s legs on social media, a doctor asked his followers to speculate as to what the condition might be.
A physician with over 630,000 followers on X, Sam Ghali, M.D., posted an image of a female patient’s legs and called it “one of the craziest CT scans he’s ever seen.”
But white patches were visible across the scan image, which worried some followers.
After giving people 24 hours to guess what they thought the answer could be, Dr. Ghali revealed that the patient in question had been suffering from Cysticercosis, which he explained is the “infamous parasitic infection caused by ingestion of larval cysts of Taenia solium, also known as: pork tapeworm.”.
The National Organisation for Rare Disorders explains that “cysticercosis arises from the ingestion of the pork tapeworm’s eggs through fecal-oral contamination, and involves the development of cysts throughout the body, but not in the intestinal tract.”
In a subsequent tweet, Dr. Ghali clarified that “after the eggs are ingested (humans or pigs), they release larvae, which penetrate the intestinal wall and invade the bloodstream (via mesenteric venules), and from there can spread literally anywhere in the entire body.”
Dr. Ghali lists the “brain, eyes, subcutaneous tissues, and skeletal muscles” as the body’s most common places.
The larvae create cysts known as cysticerci wherever they land.
The tweet’s scan illustrates the body’s normal inflammatory reaction to the cysticerci, which results in their death and calcification—a condition sometimes referred to as “rice grain calcifications” because of how they look.
What’s terrifying is what Dr. Ghali wrote next: “What can be really bad is when the larvae end up traveling up to the brain and form cysts in actual brain tissue. This specific condition is known as neurocysticercosis. It can lead to headaches, confusion, seizures, and other serious neurologic problems.”
The NORD adds that the condition “can affect anyone at any age and affects males and females in equal numbers.”
According to the organization, people with cysticercosis typically have no symptoms and don’t require therapy. For those who do, there are drugs available.
The World Health Organization adds that neurocysticercosis (NCC) can lead to epileptic seizures. According to WHO, Taenia solium is reportedly the cause of “30% of epilepsy cases in many endemic areas where people and roaming pigs live in close proximity.”
Furthermore, “in high-risk communities, it can be associated with as many as 70% of epilepsy cases.”
“The treatment for cysticercosis located within the nervous system (neurocysticercosis) consists of antiparasitic therapy, corticosteroids, antiepileptic drugs, and/or surgery. Treatment is always individualized for each patient,” NORD adds.
In a final message to his followers, Dr. Ghali writes: “So the moral of the story here is do your best to keep clean, always wash your hands, and never, ever eat raw or undercooked pork.”
Maybe I’m just staying away from it entirely.