Posted on 06/30/2012 10:01:39 PM PDT by DogByte6RER
How to Kill a Parasitic Worm Living Inside of You
Parasitic worms are the stuff of nightmares — worms as big as twelve feet long can rummage through your intestines, and then leave in the middle of the night. Urban legends tell tales of tapeworms carried by diet pills. Some of the weird schemes for removing these parasites include a combination of duct tape, candy bars, and bodily orifices.
What is the reality behind these parasites? And how can you really get rid of one, without the need for extreme measures?
Tapeworms hide in your food Obtaining a beef or pork parasite is rather easy, but also easily avoidable. Undercooked meat is a common way to ingest both Taenia solium and Taenia saginata, whose larvae often live inside pigs and cows. Either species of tapeworm can grow up to twelve feet and live inside of a human host for several years.
Tapeworms can cause a variety of health problems, including seizures, obscured or blurry vision, and a swelling of the brain if larvae move to that region. Most infections are asymptomatic, however, with the patient only realizing they are harboring a tapeworm when they pass a wiggling section of the worm while defecating. Manual removal of a tapeworm through the mouth is also possible, but not fun.
Hookworms lay traps in the soil The hookworm is much smaller than a tapeworm. These parasites are rarely more than a centimeter long, and burrow into your small intestine to feast on your blood. Since hookworms latch onto your small intestine and divert nutrients away from the bloodstream, they're actually more problematic than tapeworms. Hookworm infection can lead to anemia, slower cognitive growth, and malnutrition.
Hookworms infect over a billion people worldwide. The vast majority of these people live without advanced sanitation, amidst subtropic and tropical climates. Transmission of hookworms is quite devious and more involved than tapeworm transmission. When the soil cools off at night, hookworm larvae extend out of the soil, waiting to latch onto any human foot that passes overhead. Local sanitation problems come into the equation when larvae are passed through feces, allowing them to infect humans through both direct contact and contaminated water.
Pinworms sneak out of your anus at night Tiny pinworms lay eggs around a host's anus, leading to an itching sensation, which creates a vicious cycle if your fingers come in contact with your mouth — since this allows the eggs to enter the digestive tract.
Pinworms are found worldwide, and they're the bane of many North American elementary schools, as infections often begin through human contact or through recently used surfaces like toilet seats, faucets, and doorknobs. Thankfully, the symptoms of a pinworm infection are not nearly as severe as a hookworm invasion, — the worst pinworm symptoms include itchiness, irritability, and weight loss.
A common test for pinworms involves taping the anal region of a possible host, and inspecting the tape for eggs after a good night's sleep. (If you can sleep in that condition.) Pinworms don't just travel to the anus and lay eggs as part of a cruel joke — they need access to fresh air for their eggs to mature.
Killing the unwelcome guests within A number of pharmaceutical treatments are available to rid humans of unwelcome worm guests. These drugs are called anthelmintics — and this includes several different types of drug, each with different methods of killing worms. (Prior to the development of small-molecule pharmaceuticals, people used to eat tobacco, pineapple, and honey to rid the body of worms.)
Benzimidazoles are the largest and most versatile class of anthelmintics. This class of drugs starves the worms by cutting off their ability to absorb glucose. Benzimidazoles bind to the protein beta-tubulin, which disrupts any processes that make use of microtubules.
Albendazole is the MVP of this class of drug — it works against pinworms, hookworms, tapeworms, and a variety of other worm infections. The broad spectrum application and low cost of albendazole makes it a first-line defense against parasitic worms.
Ivermectin is an increasingly important drug used for treating parasitic infections. Ivermectin interferes with a parasite's neurotransmitters, paralyzing the invaders indiscriminately, and eventually leading to death.
Unfortunately, Ivermectin does not work against tapeworms, but the drug's method of action allows it to eliminate most intestinal worms, as well as external parasites like scabies and lice. Patients can also wait three months to a year between doses of ivermectin. The infrequent dosage and wide scale application of ivermectin make it the anthelmintic of choice for treatment of parasites in Third World countries.
Albendazole and ivermectin are only two of a legion of available anthelmintics. But just like antibiotic-resistant infections, we're starting to see parasites that have resistance to anthelmintics. That's why there's a wide variety of other drugs to fight parasitic worms. But any strategy for fighting parasites has to include more personal hygiene and sanitation, as well as dosing family members with anti-parasite drugs — as these worms tend to pass from family member to family member.
Hmmm...
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
Wormwood was a traditional cure.
............The best way to rid the body of these is to put the patient on their stomach, if necessary prop open the mouth, after placing about a 1/2 pound of raw hamburger 4 inches from the patient’s mouth. When the worm starts to exit the mouth for the bait, grab it as quick as possible. Be careful not to get bit.
THANKS! NOW THAT’S JUST DISGUSTING!
ping
It’s only disgusting if you hang the Patient upside down with a mirror on the floor below him.
I'm not sleeping tonight. May as well get up and roast coffee.
That's not vaguely disturbing... that's disturbing. Deep in the bowels disturbing. Oh hell.
I hope you are happy.
I'll be much more careful on the threads I click on.
/johnny
All of the serious conservative candidates are members of the Republican Party, until this is no longer the case.
Prevention for tapeworms: become a vegetarian.
I got hookworm on our honeymoon in Barbados - in one of my feet! Symptoms started with an itchy foot. Upon closer inspection the “rash” was all squiggly lines. As I told my wife - this rash looks like a bunch of worm-trails. Still thinking it was just a rash, but not getting any better, I went to the doc.
Luckily he had been a medic in Vietnam.
“Wow - that’s hookworm. I haven’t seen that since Vietnam! Barbados you say? That makes sense - poor sanitation and then a dog poops on the beach and you come walking by... Hey - do you mind if I show the rest of the docs and staff your foot? They’ve never seen hookworm before, and I doubt they ever will again. This is so cool!” (About 8 people from his small place stopped by to look!)
He gave me medication to apply to my foot twice a day. After a week it was better but not gone, so he phoned in a refill. I went to the pharmacy and got the bottle, and looked at the instructions and it said “Take 1 tablespoon twice a day.” I told the lady that must be wrong, as I wasn’t drinking it, but putting it on my feet. She got all snippy at me and told me “maybe that’s why it wasn’t working so now you need to drink it”.
I got home, opened it up and looked at it in the tablespoon - the same stuff I had been putting on my foot!! No way. I called the doc the next day to make sure I was suppose to drink it. “Yes - it is the same medicine you drink if the hookworm is in your intestine - but why would you think to drink it?”
I went to the pharmacy and asked to talk to the pharmacist. He sheepishly told me “Well it had said apply 2x - but I had never heard of that so I changed it to the normal does of drinking a tablespoon.
I was pretty irate, asked him if he was always changing doctors’ prescriptions, and changed pharmacies.
The hookworm did leave though.
When you have pinworms you scratch your anus and touch your mouth.
Don't scratch your anus and touch your mouth:
:)
[no sneaking off to the home garden center]
DE also kills fleas in an excruciating, exquisitely painful way...it cuts them to shreds.
"These drugs are called anthelmintics."
I'll be voting Anthelmintics down the ticket this November.
Oooof!
Sounds like my tummy after eating Mexican food.
Not pretty! lol
Darksheare’s fault.
[Really. He introduced me to that song.]
DE also kills roaches and other insects that crawl over it. Works on ant beds also. Sprinkle around doors, windows, baseboards, or any other possible entrance to the home and they will die.
Yep.
Non-toxic, too.
You can even dust your dogs with it to kill fleas if you’re careful to not let them or yourself breathe the dust.
Diatoms; nature’s little bug assassins.
:)
I suppose it's possible to kill the worms, but then end up with cancer or aplastic anemia.
I wouldn't try it if I were you. Course under Obama Care, that might be the first choice they try as long as gas is under $4 a gallon.
How do you think the cows got 'em?
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