A 12cm flesh-eating tapeworm has been removed from a Chinese man's brain.
Guangzhou local Wang Lei began to experience numbness down the left side of his arm in 2007 and eventually had to quit his job after suffering seizures.
The 36-year-old spent 10 years searching for answers before doctors finally found the tapeworm in 2018, Chinese media reports.
Surgeons removed the parasite from the man's brain during a two-hour surgery, and discovered the tapeworm had been feeding on Wang for the past 15 years.
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Doctor Gu Youming told a local reporter, "the surgery was risky, because the worm was alive at the time, it would have crawled inside his brain and eaten his brain."
The doctors made sure they properly removed the entire tapeworm.
"The live tapeworm was moving in his brain and we had to remove all of it otherwise the leftover part could grow again," Gu said.
Wang likely caught the tapeworm from the fried snails he regularly ate for dinner.
Youming said people should be careful when cooking frogs, snails and snakes, which need to be cooked thoroughly.
Newshub.
