Humans become infected by accidentally eating raw vegetables containing or contaminated with infected slugs or snails, or by eating undercooked organisms that eat slugs or snails, such as land crabs, freshwater prawns, or frogs. In the woman’s case, doctors suspected she became infected by eating raw seafood and salads during recent air travel, where the parasite is a known risk. Fortunately, the woman was treated for the infection and made a full recovery.
3. Man gets drunk, wakes up to discover a medical mystery that nearly kills him
It’s not every day that someone gets drunk and wakes up with a case so mysterious that a master therapist specializing in medical reasoning is called in to help solve it. But in a case published this year in the New England Journal of Medicine, a 36-year-old man did just that.
The man came to the hospital with abdominal pain, wheezing in the lungs, bacteria in the blood, liver abnormalities, injury to the small intestine and a blood clot in his right kidney – and no clear idea of how any of these things happened or how they were connected.
In the case report, doctors describe how they identified all the aspects of her condition and then how Gurpreet Dhaliwal, a master clinician at the University of California, San Francisco, figured out how they fit together.
Taking a fascinating look at the diagnostic detective, Dhaliwal argues that it all comes down to beer and toothpicks. Dhaliwal speculated that the man – who had a history of excessive drinking – was drunk, ate something and accidentally swallowed the toothpick. While drunk, the man consumed some of the food, which caused an infection in his lungs. Meanwhile, the toothpick entered his small intestine near his right kidney, causing injury and a blood clot. The injury then became infected, causing sepsis and abnormalities in his liver.
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