The Worm Guy

He was Mathew Broderick’s character, Dr. Niko Tatopolous, in the 1999 version of Godzilla. Other characters called him the worm guy because he was a researcher studying the effects of radiation on various species including the earth worms in Chernobyl.

Now we have another worm guy, Robert F Kennedy, Jr (RFK), who says that a doctor told him that a worm had eaten part of his brain. RFK most likely has neurocysticercosis – one or more brain cysts caused by Tinea solium (pork tapeworm) larvae.

If one consumes the eggs of this tapeworm, the emerging larvae enter the blood stream and can travel to any organ in the body including the brain. The immune system recognizes the foreign body and attacks it resulting in a cyst. Most such cysts, even in the brain, require no treatment. When they do, the treatment is either anti-parasitic drugs or surgical excision or both. Sometimes, the damaged tissue surrounding a cyst becomes a source of seizure activity. When that happens, anti-seizure medications are used to manage the seizures.

Cysticercosis occurs everywhere throughout the world where pork is consumed, but it is most common in developing countries where sanitation is suboptimal. Like many foodborne illnesses, the viable eggs of the tapeworm are consumed in undercooked meat or added to a meal by food handlers who have the intestinal parasite and fail to use proper hand hygiene – infection by the fecal-oral route, as it were.

It is unlikely that RFK’s brain cyst has anything to do with his bat shit crazy anti-vaxx ideas or conspiracy theories – for what that’s worth. I think that I am going to call him the worm guy from now until he disappears.