July - 2017

Rabid: 9 years gone and things are worse

For about nine years now, I have been traveling to Baltimore on a semi-annual basis. I go to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and deliver, more or less, the same talk, year after year, about rabies. 9 years, and more deaths. It's part of the vector-borne section of the course. While not a vector-borne disease (unless we wish to think of dogs as a vector between us and bats--a bit of a stretch, if you ask me), rabies is considered one of the Neglected Tropi

Hydatid Disease (Part II) : How a tiny tapeworm larva makes you wicked sick (Gross picture alert)

Let's go back to the life cycle of Echinococcus granulosus, the cestode (tapeworm) that causes hydatid disease. (There are two types of people: Those who like studying parasite life cycles, and those who would rather suffer from the parasite. Guess which type we are here at PAZ.) Here is an adult Taenia solium tapeworm, (also known as the pork tapeworm, the kind you get from eating infested, undercooked pork) being extracted from a patient's intestines via endoscopy (this is