A California sushi fan may be reconsidering his diet after pulling a five-foot tapeworm out of his body.
The man, whose identity has not been revealed, showed up at a hospital in Fresno carrying a plastic bag containing an immensely long worm.
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He told doctors he had been suffering from discomfort for months and that it felt like something was moving around his guts, the Guardian reports.
When he was sitting on the toilet during an episode of diarrhoea, he looked down to see what he thought was his own intestine sticking out of his anus.
When he pulled on the object it began to unravel and move, and the man realised a tapeworm was hanging out of his body.
After he had extracted the entire worm, he wrapped it around a toilet paper roll and put it in a plastic bag to bring to hospital.
When doctors unravelled the worm and laid it out, it was found to measure 5 foot 6 inches, which is around the height of an average New Zealand woman.
The man, who was treated with a standard deworming tablet, said he ate raw fish in some form almost every day, especially salmon sashimi.
While flash freezing is supposed to kill parasites in sushi, they can survive in fish or meat that has been improperly prepared.
When eaten, larvae can move into a human digestive tract where they may live happily until they die and are passed out of the body.
Newshub.
