What It's Like When A Guinea Worm Living Inside Your Body Suddenly Burrows Out

This article is part of HuffPost’s Project Zero campaign, a yearlong series on neglected tropical diseases and efforts to fight them. JUBA, South Sudan ― It took days for Maker Achuil and others to slowly pull the arm-length, spaghetti-like worm out of his thigh. After a year with the white parasite inside him, Achuil screamed in pain as the grown Guinea worm emerged. A former soldier in South Sudan, which fought for decades before gaining its independence from Sudan in 2011, Achuil still shudders at the memory of the agony he felt as the worm was gradually wound around a stick. “It was like putting a cigarette out on your leg ― for days,” said Achuil, rolling up his trouser to show the scars from the burning fluids the worm excreted as it burrowed out to breed. “It made you exhausted, but you were in too much pain to sleep. All you wanted to do was swim in the lake to cool the pain.” The worms, which resemble stretched chewing gum, lay their microscopic young in stagnant water. People drink the water and ingest the worms, which grow and mate inside the host for about a year. The male dies and the female starts to dig its way out through the human host’s flesh. When that person submerges the affected area in water, say, to bathe or to dull the burning pain, the worm spews out its young. Guinea worm disease was once common across Africa and Asia, with an estimated 3.5 million cases in 1986. But in the mid-1980s,...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news