@
ShadowTheEdgehog
This is one of my all-time favorite shows! I was/am in love with it! The show was at its best the first two seasons, back when it was solely about parasitic infection. Starting with season 3, they expanded to other types of infection, which was okay WHEN they stuck to infection. I realize that finding enough stories about parasitic infection to do the show would be difficult, but it really irritated me when they did stories that weren't about bacterial/viral/fungal/parasitic infections at all. I'm talking about baby who swallowed a button battery, man who had a granulomatous reaction to inhaling a pea in his lung, woman with ovarian teratoma, etc. Those were garbage and took away from what the show was meant to be!
Yes, I'm very passionate about this show. :P
Anyway, I remember first hearing about the pork tapeworm and how chilling it was. My bachelor's degree is in neuroscience, so naturally, I love the brain. I had very little knowledge of parasitic infection prior to
Monsters Inside Me. One of the first episodes I watched was about neurocysticercosis.
So, there are two types of pork tapeworm infection. And two types of hosts for the pork tapeworm: pigs and humans. In the traditional infection, humans eat undercooked pork that is infected with the tapeworm. The human then has adult tapeworms live in their intestine, and the tapeworms' eggs are expelled in the human's feces. When pigs eat the infected feces, the cycle restarts. But when a human ingests pork tapeworm eggs by consuming something infected with feces of an infected person, this is when things get dark! The eggs hatch and are meant to be inside a pig, so they don't know what to do. (This is called "dead-end host.") They wander through the human, trying to find a way to escape. They often end up in the brain. The human will start having neurological symptoms, like seizures, and scans will reveal pork tapeworm cysts! It's absolutely horrifying!
Remember the theme song of the first two seasons? "Worms invisible to the naked eye. Microscopic amoebae. Insects thirsty for blood... These are parasites, but to those infected, they are the MONSTERS INSIDE ME!" Amazing! And the parasite episodes always ended with, "How did [Insert Name Here] get infected? The answer lies in the parasite's life cycle." The answer always was traced back to the parasite's life cycle. Always.
I have all the episodes of the first two seasons on DVR. I also have select episodes of the later seasons- ones where they introduced a new parasite or ones where the non-parasitic infection was good. Like the season 3 premiere where the guy got bubonic plague.
I've had a special interest in anatomy/physiology/medicine ever since I was a toddler, but this show was what introduced me to infectious disease, an area I always was fascinated and horrified by but never really delved into deeply. I bought a textbook about medical parasitology because of this show. I couldn't believe how many organisms I had never heard of.
Angiostrongylus cantonensis/rat lung worm, pork tapeworm/
Taenia solium,
Naeglaria fowleri (brain-eating amoeba found in freshwater lakes), Strongyloides, Schistosomiasis, the list goes on. Go check out my dragons. I have several that are
Monsters Inside Me-themed.
I'm pinging @
Edelgard about this thread, because I know they love the show as much as I do.
