Great, one look at that picture up top and now I’m keen for some sushi.

I don’t want to make you any guarantees, but there’s a decent chance that by the end of this article the craving will have waned a little.

We’ll start with a story told by A&E doctor Kenny Bahn, who works at a hospital in California. He encountered a rather unusual patient a while back, so let’s pop over to the Guardian to get the ball rolling there:

The patient had complained of abdominal pain. During a bout of bloody diarrhoea, reports Bahn, “he says: ‘I look down and I look like there’s a piece of intestine hanging out of me.’ What’s racing through his mind is he thinks he’s dying … He grabs it and he pulls on it and it keeps coming out. ‘What is this long piece of entrail?’ And he picks it up and looks at it and what does it do?” There is a dramatic pause to enhance the horror. “It starts moving.”

Bahn said that the tapeworm had probably come from the patient’s daily intake of salmon sashimi. “He told me he was freaked out, but I guess when you think you’re dying because your entrails are shooting out your bottom and you find out it’s not you, but something else, that’s probably a good thing.”

Nothing like a giant wriggly worm hanging out of your backside to put you off salmon sashimi, eh?

According to Peter Olson, a tapeworm expert and researcher at the Natural History Museum’s life sciences department (now there’s a job to tell the grandchildren about), it was probably a broad fish tapeworm imbibed during a sushi session:

“A typical life cycle might include a bear that feeds on salmon, then defecates back into the river. The larvae would be passed into the environment and, in the case of an aquatic life cycle like this, it would be eaten by something like a copepod, a little crustacean. When that copepod is eaten by a fish, it would transform into a larval tapeworm and that’s what is being transmitted to a human in this case. That would go to the intestine and grow into this giant worm.”

Well ain’t that a buzzkill.

Now the article does mention that there are many other, more likely methods of contracting tapeworm than from eating sushi, but then there’s this:

…doctors have warned that contracting diseases in this way is a risk of which we should become more aware. A case report in the British Medical Journal last March told of a 32-year-old man in Portugal who was admitted to hospital with severe abdominal pain; an endoscopy revealed a parasitic worm was attached to his gut wall and it was removed. It is thought he ingested the parasite while eating sushi.

“Owing to changes in food habits, anisakiasis [disease caused by worms from fish, causing symptoms such as pain, vomiting and diarrhoea] is a growing disease in western countries, which should be suspected in patients with a history of ingestion of raw or uncooked fish,” wrote the researchers.

If you happen to have a little downstairs itch that needs scratching, and you’ve been smashing that sushi, then our thoughts and prayers are with you.

[source:guardian]