he swallows a slug which transmits a deadly parasite!

The challenges that adolescents set themselves to test their courage sometimes have dramatic consequences. In Australia, a teenager accepts an unsavory challenge launched by friends: to eat two slugs they found in his garden in Sydney. Chick! The young man does so but will bitterly regret it.

A few days later, he started to feel bad. He contracts a violent gastrogastro which lasts a week but eventually gets over it. Three weeks later, he feels nauseous, vomits repeatedly, and has neck stiffness and intolerance to lightslights strong. With his parents, he goes to the hospital to find out what’s wrong. On auscultation, doctors identify a weak feverfever and the signs of meningitis, but its to scanto scan of brainbrain shows no problem.

On the other hand, his blood test is more worrying. He has a number of eosinophilic granulocytes well above normal values; of the monocytesmonocytes are also present in large quantities in its liquidliquid cephalocephalo-spinal. Eosinophilia is usually associated with a parasitic infection or allergyallergy. Doctors do a test to detect two speciesspecies Common parasitic worms in Australia: Strongyloids and Angiostrongylus. The results are negative. After 12 days in the hospital he returns home; his meningitis considered cured.

A serious infection by a worm parasitic on rats

Except that his condition suddenly worsened five days later, forcing his family to return to the hospital. He was admitted in a worrying state: irritable, drowsy, edemaedema papillary of the eye which testifies to a pressurepressure in the skullskull too high and numb hands. His blood tests revealed eosinophilia three times more severe than during his first hospitalization. This time, the brain scan shows multiple lesions in the mattermatter white. The doctors question the young patient who ends up admitting that he ate two slugs five weeks previously. The presence of the parasite is finally confirmed.

Both molluscsmolluscs were two slugs leopardsleopards (Limax maximus)one of the intermediate hosts of Angiostrongylus cantonensis, a parasitic worm several centimeters long that normally infects lungslungs some rats. Humans are an accidental host of the worm, which becomes contaminated by eating raw or poorly cooked molluscs, or vegetables contaminated with larvaelarvae. The latter reach the adult stage after two to three weeks and cause what doctors call meningo-encephalitisencephalitis eosinophilic.

Sometimes fatal cases

The teenager remained in hospital for 17 days and took more than five months to recover from the infection before returning to normal daily life. This case described in 2003 is the first report of acquired human angiostrongyliasis, but not the last.

In 2010, a young Australian took on the same challenge: eating slugs. The molluscs were also contaminated by Angiostrongylus who plunged him for 420 days into the comacoma and left him paralyzed from the head down for eight years. He finally died in 2018.