A guy at work was telling us he saw a show on Discover last night about Tapeworms. He said that the show says most people have them… including people in North America.
Now, I did not see the show but that sounds quite suprising. I did a quick google search but didn’t find much info with stats.
Does anyone know how common Tapeworm (and for that matter, other worm parasites) are in the “first” world?
The Centers for Disease Control, in a 1992 report, found that of over 200,000 stool samples analyzed by various state diagnostic laboratories, 20% had some sort of parasite (mostly protozoans), several percent had some sort of worms, and 0.1% had some sort of tapeworm.
I suspect that the “most people” canard has to do with (1) people with worms may be overrepresented in the doctor’s office; (2) people with “colonic cleansing” and “parasite therapies” tend to diagnose everything as worms, even if they haven’t found any; (3) worms are endemic in other countries, especially those with poor procedures for handling meat or manure.
Thanks for the link!
There is a rumour on my campus (propagated by a biology professor, which lends it credibility) that one of the pathobiologists on campus deliberately ingested a tapeworm or somesort so that he could study teh effects it has on him.
Weird.