Fresno doctor says of ‘giant’ parasite patient wrapped round toilet roll: ‘Apparently it was still wriggling when he put it in the bag’

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

A California man’s daily sushi habit ended in a trip to hospital with a stomach-churning item to show doctors: a 5ft tapeworm that “wiggled” out of his body.



Fresno emergency department doctor Kenny Banh told the Guardian he was sceptical when the man walked into his hospital, asking for treatment for a worm.

But when the patient opened a plastic bag, the “giant” parasite was inside, wrapped around a toilet roll.

“Apparently it was still wriggling when he put it in the bag but it had died in transit,” Banh said.

No! Sushi – the parasitic nightmare in your lunchbox Read more

The patient, whose identity has not been revealed, told the doctor that during a bout of bloody diarrhoea he looked down and thought a piece of his intestine was hanging from his behind.

When the man pulled on it and it kept coming out, he realized it was moving and must be a worm.

This was marginally better, Banh said, than “if you think you’re dying because your entrails are shooting out of your bottom”.

The incident happened last August but came to light this week because Banh spoke about it on a medical podcast called This Won’t Hurt a Bit.

It’s not eating your pizza, it’s eating you Dr Kenny Banh

He unravelled the worm, he said, and laid it on paper towel on the floor of the trauma room at the Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno.

It was 5ft 6in long. The patient was given a deworming pill which, Banh explained, was no different from the kind generally given to pets.

“He said he’d felt like something was moving around in his guts and he thought it was just gas,” Banh said of the patient. “He’d been in discomfort for a few months.”

The man said he ate raw fish, especially salmon sashimi, almost every day.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The head of a dog tapeworm. The parasite’s larvae can survive on poorly prepared foods. Photograph: Wellcome Trust/PA./PA

Last January, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put out a warning of an elevated risk of parasitic larvae that can grow into tapeworms being found in Pacific Ocean salmon, including Alaskan wild salmon that is popular in the US and elsewhere.

Cooking kills the tiny larvae; sushi is supposed to be flash-frozen to kill such parasites too. Larvae may survive in poorly prepared raw salmon, then take up residence in a human digestive tract.

Many human hosts experience no symptoms. Worms often die and are passed at the end of their lifecycle. They can also slip out alive, as in the case in Fresno.

• This article was amended on 22 January 2018 to remove an erroneous reference to tapeworms consuming a host’s blood.