A Fresno, California, man with a daily habit of eating sushi pulled a 5-foot tapeworm from his intestines and brought it to the emergency room where he asked to be treated for tapeworms.
Dr. Kenny Bahn said he treated the man when he came into the ER with bloody diarrhea, and was at first skeptical that the man actually had a tapeworm. Bahn told the story of the patient on the podcast “This Won’t Hurt a Bit,” where he described the man saying he felt the worm "wiggling out" and presented Bahn with a toilet paper roll that had the worm wrapped around it.
The man said he noticed the worm after using the toilet and pulled as much of it out as he could before coming to the Fresno Community Regional Medical Center for treatment.
“I get asked this a lot,” Bahn said, SFGate reported. “Truthfully, a lot of times I don’t think they have it.”
After treating the man with deworming medication used in humans and dogs, Bahn measured the tapeworm and found that it was 5 feet, 6 inches — the same height as Bahn himself, SFGate reported.
The man confessed he ate raw salmon sashimi on a daily basis, which may have been how he contracted the tapeworm.
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control put out a study that showed a prevalence of tapeworm in wild salmon caught off the coast of Alaska. Properly cooking salmon will kill the parasite, but eating it raw as in sushi allows it to grow when it is ingested.
Twitter users were appropriately grossed out by the story.
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