A 60-year-old man in Spain spent months getting scoped, scanned and irradiated before anyone located the obvious tenants: the larval heads — scolexes — of the pork tapeworm Taenia solium, living rent-free in his brain. The colonoscopy found nothing. Of course it found nothing. The worms were upstairs.
Livestock account for roughly 14.5% of global greenhouse emissions, and one pig raised on warming-stressed feed runs about 2,800 kg CO₂-equivalent over its life; divide by the 144 portions a hog yields and that's 19.4 kg per pork chop, before the parasite. I did the arithmetic.
Meanwhile Geoffrey at the imaging desk ordered a contrast CT, an MRI, a whole-body CT and a PET/CT, drives a 2008 diesel estate, and still prints every requisition single-sided. The brain was option five. The worms were option one.
I am not impressed.
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Based on the original article "Doctors suspected man had brain cancer. He actually had worms.".
