Tensions can run high when living
with roommates. Quibbles over dishes, the rent and utilities, and even
questionable hygiene practices can inflame tempers and sabotage relationships,
leaving passive-aggressive notes and broken homes in their wake. There are many
ways of managing a good home life within a shared household of semi-strangers,
but we’ll save that for another time in another column. This is about a
roommate dispute gone totally to the worms.
In 1970, four housemates living in
Quebec were in a spat over the rent. Specifically, one housemate, a
post-graduate in the department of parasitology at MacDonald College, was
significantly late on his share of the monthly dues. Tensions ran high, and the
quarrels continued. In what sounds like a particularly acrimonious argument,
the delinquent housemate made a seemingly outlandish threat: he would poison
them with the same organisms that he experimented upon in his laboratory, with
the pig parasite Ascaris suum. His threat was quickly dismissed
and the roommate was summarily evicted.
It was only a week later when the
four housemates ended up in a hospital after an elaborate dinner – yes, you’ve
already figured it all out, haven’t you? – prepared by the delinquent room mate
that the threat of poisoning by parasite was revisited.
There’s something you have to know
about the Ascaris roundworm. As with all parasitic worms, it takes a
twisty, nomadic route through the body after it infects a human. It is
transmitted by that most unsavory mode of infection, with the eggs reaching the
mouth after exiting the body at the other end, the route of fecal-oral
transmission. But the parasite is not content to be confined to the belly.
After the larvae hatch from the egg, they fight their way out of the
intestines, mosey their way to a blood vessel, and are delivered to the lungs.
They burst out of the alveoli, crawl up the bronchi, ascend the trachea until
reaching the back of the throat where they are swallowed and are delivered once
again to the intestines. There the larvae will mature into adults, mate, and
release their eggs in the feces, propelling their offspring into a new
iteration of this magical journey of poop and procreation.
In the four afflicted housemates,
this porcine parasite began its circuitous voyage as described above, but
instead of struggling skyward from the lungs to the throat before plunging back
into the warm and welcoming environs of the gastrointestinal tract, these worms
remained stuck in the lungs. The housemates came down with fever, cough, and
malaise, but the most serious symptom was a severe shortness of breath,
“respiratory distress” in medical parlance, which necessitated hospitalization.
The antibiotics that were first used
as treatment failed to alleviate what was presumed to be community-associated
pneumonia. Collection and analysis of their sputum did yield, however, the
parasitic eggs that provided an end to the mystery. The exiled housemate’s
threat appeared to hold true: were the four men poisoned with food “maliciously
seasoned” with ripe Ascaris eggs? (1)
It was later estimated that the men
had been infected with hundreds of thousands of eggs, far exceeding the usual
dosage of a few eggs that can naturally occur in regions endemic with the
parasite. Two men were so heavily dosed that they were in critical condition
caused by acute respiratory failure from parasitic pneumonia. Thankfully, all
poisoned men made a full recovery.
The miscreant roommate was charged
with four counts of attempted murder. In court, he denied carrying out the
threat and was eventually fully acquitted due to inconclusive and
circumstantial evidence. The judge presiding over the case concluded that there
existed a possibility that “the parasites might have gotten into the food by
way of what the accused claimed was a recurring sewage backup into the kitchen
sink of the house” (2). This plumbing defense was soundly denied by one of
the poisoned roommates, however, and also raises the question of how
a gentleman’s laboratory work with a tropical parasite could possibly be
found in his kitchen sink in the midst of a Canadian winter.
As a pair of parasitologists writing
about the esoteric subject of parasites in forensics remarked on the incident,
“the fact that this is such an isolated case suggests that it is only when
there is the rare coincidence of a parasitologist with a homicidal grudge that
parasites are likely to be used for nefarious purposes” (3). For our sake, let
us hope that parasitologists keep their study materials away from our bodies
and, in an attempt to ensure that this case remains an isolated one, let us all
make an effort to keep the parasitologists in our lives happy.
No comments:
Post a Comment