Fighting tapeworm in backyard pigs

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

A bursary awarded to Ellen Hughes, a student at Britain's Cambridge University, is aimed at improving the management of backyard pigs in Ghana and other sub-Saharan countries.

Pigs don't grow as well as they could when they are infected with the pig tapeworm Taenia solium Cysticercosis. Human hosts do even worse. The tapeworm is known to spread Neurocysticercosis, a major cause of epilepsy in the sub-Sahara. This so-called "acquired" epilepsy shows up more often in the developed world because of immigration.

Humans are the only host known to harbour the adult tapeworm. Both pigs and humans can harbour the larvae or cysticerci. Vegetarians and other non-pork eaters can acquire the disease through fecal contamination of their food. The tiny embryos travel through the blood stream to muscles and brain, where they can grow to be a centimetre in size, causing epileptic seizures in 85 per cent of patients where the disease has been identified. BP