Chennai Doctors Found 'Worms' In Heart Surgery Patient

De-worming may be a task that is often handed down to interns, but not this time. When doctors at the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital (RGGGH)looked at the CT-scan of a 54-year-old farmer, they thought that the machine had conked — because it showed lesions from head to toe, resembling gun-pellets.

Baffled but not deterred, they stuck him under the scanner again and to their shock, found that the dots were hundreds of ‘pork tapeworms’ (Taenia solium), swimming around every major organ system in his body.

Ironically, he had initially been brought in for a bypass surgery, that paled in comparison to this super-rare medical condition.

The surgical team headed by Dr J Amalorpavanathan, senior  vascular surgeon, had admitted P Palani, from Reddiyar Palam village in Tiruvannamalai, last November. Palani was diagnosed with an aorto iliac occlusion – a block in one of the large arteries that supply blood to the hind limbs. 

He had been referred from a government hospital to RGGGH as they could not do the surgery there .“We were readying the patient for surgery when we saw this nest of tapeworms everywhere in his body. We did not know what they were, so we roped in the chiefs of radiology, general medicine and neurology, who eventually diagnosed it,” he said. It turned out to be cysticercosis — an infestation of pork tapeworms throughout Palani’s skin and muscles.

As the name of the worm belies, pork eaters are susceptible to it — especially if the pork is not cooked well enough. The worms would lay and hatch larvae inside the body and multiply abundantly, causing neurological issues and seizures — sometimes years after entering the host.

Usually, the condition can be seen as a bulge on the skin if these worms remain just outside the cutaneous membrane, but in this patient they were hidden under the muscle sheath. Palani himself admitted, “I used to eat pork while enjoying a drink with my friends. The thing is, I felt no discomfort, so I never knew I was living with these many worms inside my body.”

So they pumped him full of drugs that would kill most of the worms. “We could not do the surgery as it may have caused anaphylactic shock. Hence the patient was given a drug called albenbazole and steroids and discharged,” doctors said.

He was readmitted to the hospital on December 21, when the number of tapeworms had reduced, and we did the surgery.

We placed an artificial dacron graft in the place of the faulty artery and now he can walk normally. The blood flow to the limbs have been restored and of course the number of worms had also come down,” said Dr J Amalorpavanathan, senior vascular surgeon.