New Delhi doctors managed to remove a six-foot-long tapeworm from a man’s small intestine.
(Mirror Daily, United States) – A team of doctors from New Delhi’s Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences Hospital has been successful in removing a 6-foot long tapeworm from a patient’s intestines. The procedure lasted approximately one hour and fifteen minutes, and, according to the doctors performing it, the tapeworm was so long that it did not seem to end.
The patients living with the six-foot long tapeworm in his intestines is a 48-year-old Indian resident. According to the patient’s file, the man came in for a consult back in 2014, complaining about tolerable abdominal pains.
Doctor Cyriac Philips, one of the doctors in charge of the man’s case, declared via e-mail, that the 48-year-old patient underwent a colonoscopy after accusing abdominal pains. His bloodwork indicated a low hemoglobin level, considered to be a telltale sign of parasitic infection.
The physician performing the colonoscopy found out that the man had a rather lengthy tapeworm in his intestine. However, the initial investigations did not reveal the tapeworm’s real length.
Recently, the man was transferred to New Delhi’s Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences to have the tapeworm removed from his intestines. The man was anesthetized prior to the surgery, and the team of surgeons inserted an endoscope into the man’s mouth in order to see the parasite more clearly.
After determining the location of the parasite, using a pair of forceps, the team began to extract the parasite from the man’s small intestine. Cyriac Philips was one of the doctors involved in the man’s surgery.
The doctor commented that the tapeworm lodged in the man’s intestine was so long, that it took the team more than one hour in order to pull it out. Measurements were taken later revealed that the tapeworm was 6.1 foot-long and it belonged to the Taenia solium genus.
Philips also declared that tapeworms belonging to this genus measure between 6.5 to 23 feet, although there have been reports of tapeworms as long as 26 feet. The procedure was successful, and the man is presently recovering in the New Delhi hospital.
However, the man and his family must take a 6-month anti-parasitic treatment in order to ensure that there are no tapeworm tapes. As for the origin of the gargantuan parasite, the man’s doctors declared that the man must have picked up the parasites after eating pork meat infested with tapeworm eggs.
Image source: Wikipedia
Matthew Slotkin
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