A four year headache turned out to be a one centimetre-long tapeworm.
A new study in the Genome Biology journal reveals a man in the U.K. had the parasite removed from his brain four years after it entered his body. In the video above by GeoBeats, doctors were first baffled by MRI photos that showed lesions in different areas of the patient's brain.
"We did not expect to see an infection of this kind in the U.K., but global travel means that unfamiliar parasites do sometimes appear," Dr. Effrossyni Gkrania-Klotsas, a researcher at Addenbrooke's NHS Trust in Cambridge said in a written statement.
Tapeworms in the brain may cause seizures, memory loss, and like this patient, severe headaches, according to the Daily Mail.
Around the world, there have been about 300 cases since the 1950s. Watch the video above to find out how the removal took place.
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