How the sushi boom is fuelling tapeworm infections
As eating raw fish has become more popular, gruesome tapeworm tales have emerged. But how worried should sashimi lovers be – and how else might we become infected?
The good news, said A&E doctor Kenny Bahn, was that the patient who had turned up at the emergency department was not dying. That is about the only happy element of the story Bahn, who works at a hospital in California, went on to tell on This Won’t Hurt a Bit, a medical podcast, about a man who arrived at hospital carrying a plastic bag. Inside the bag, wrapped around the cardboard tube of a toilet roll, was a 1.7-metre (5ft 6in) tapeworm. Bahn measured it once he had unravelled it on the hospital floor. ...
Bahn said that the tapeworm had probably come from the patient’s daily intake of salmon sashimi. ...
The story has attracted attention all over the world, as these things tend to do, says Peter Olson, a tapeworm expert and a researcher at the Natural History Museum’s life sciences department, “because they’re gross”. The worm, he says, was “almost certainly something called the broad fish tapeworm ... salmon is one of the main ways you would pick it up, if you don’t cook the meat.” ...
