A Minute of Juddering, and a Suspected Blood Fluke
For about a minute, half of a woman's body juddered. She was a rice farmer in the Philippines, and she went to the emergency department. [S10E3] In a case report published in the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors wrote that they suspected she had neuroschistosomiasis — an uncommon complication of infection with a Schistosoma parasitic worm, also known as a blood fluke. [S10E7, S10E8] “Uncommon” is the operative word: this is not the ordinary course of a fluke infection, and it is the kind of case that reaches a journal's pages.
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What the scan showed: a bright cluster of nodules surrounded by fluid in her left frontal lobe, and the doctors' immediate guess was worm eggs.
The fluke's name outlasts its range. S. japonicum is the most common fluke in the Philippines and is also found in China and part of Indonesia, yet it has been eliminated from Japan despite the name.