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| News :. Man's brain infected by eating slugs
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A Sydney-based man who ate two garden slugs as a dare during a party narrowly escaped death from a rare form of meningitis, an often fatal swelling of the brain.
The case involving the consumption of leopard slugs Limax maximus was reported in this week's issue of the Medical Journal of Australia by a team including neurologist Dr Don Pryor of St George Hospital and the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
The case is the first record of a human acquiring the disease from slugs in Sydney, although other mammals in the area have been known to become infected.
As well as developing meningitis - inflammation of the membrane that surrounds the spine and the brain - the man developed encephalitis - swelling of the brain and spinal cord.
'He nearly died - his consciousness was impaired and he was very ill indeed in hospital. He had extremely high pressure inside his head,' Pryor told ABC Science Online.
'It took him many months until he felt better again : I don't think he'll ever feel the same again after such an experience but he was able to complete his university studies and get back into the same level of sporting activities as he was into before.'
While the Sydney man survived, others have not been so lucky. In an earlier case, a young child in subtropical Brisbane died, believed to have eaten slugs crawling on milk bottles which had been left at the front door. Another man had acquired the disease during a holiday in Fiji.
'If you do eat uncooked or inadequately cooked slugs or snails it is possible to get a parasitic infection that can be dangerous,' Pryor says.
Crustaceans and salad vegetables may also carry the parasite, he says. However, the risk of dying from ingesting the parasites was 'low'.
One reason for the low risk is that the natural host for the parasite is the rat, and so if the parasite finds itself inside a human it tends to die off after a couple of weeks or so.
'So you don't have to treat the disease - it cures itself when the organism dies, when it discovers you're not a rat.'
Many sources
The most infamous form of meningitis is caused by meningococcal bacteria, however, the condition can also be caused by viruses, reaction to drugs, autoimmune disease, or - more rarely - by fungus or parasites.
The cause of the Sydney man's meningitis was the parasitic worm Angiostrongylus cantonensis, which normally infests the lungs of rats. The larval stages of the worm, however, live in molluscs, including slugs. Previously, the worm had only been known to be a problem in tropical areas.
'He had a lot of the organisms actually invade the brain,' says Pryor of the Sydney man.
Pryor cautions that while the parasite was once found in the tropics, it now appears to be moving south. It is endemic in South-East Asia and the Pacific Basin, where people often eat snails from the local river.
'If they aren't adequately cooked, several members of the family will get headache and fever and vomit and have a miserable time for a few days and then they get over it.' |
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