One night, a 17-year-old boy in Australia
is on a trip with his football team.
He spots a little slug, and doesn’t think too
much of it when his friends dare him to eat it.
He says that it won’t kill him, then picks it up and swallows it.
In some countries, raw snails are a delicacy, known as
escargot—so a live slug should be fine to eat, right?
How bad could it be?
But suddenly, he feels tired, and has severe pain in his legs.
His body shuts down and he’s rushed to
the hospital, where he goes into a coma.
Doctors give the boy a 1 in 17 million chance of living.
He wakes up a month later, having lost 100 pounds,
but this was only the beginning of his nightmare.
Let’s get into it!
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One night in 2010, in Sydney, Australia, a group
of young men were on the patio having a “red wine
appreciation night” and trying to behave more like adults.
One of them, Sam Ballard, was a strong athlete and promising rugby player.
As the party went on, they spotted a garden slug making its
way across the patio, sparking a bit of banter between them.
They started talking about a dare to eat
the slug, and Sam accepted the challenge.
It was a small, innocent little creature, just like any other
common slug, so he picked it and popped it into his mouth.
Sam’s life went on for a few days without any issues,
but then he started feeling severe pain in his legs.
He asked his mom, Katie Ballard, whether it could
have anything to do with the slug he had eaten.
“No one gets sick from that,” his mother reassured him.
However, his condition getting worse, Sam went to the doctor,
and was diagnosed with a condition called rat lungworm.
Medical professionals confirmed that he had
probably gotten it from eating the slug.
Unfortunately, the condition infected Sam’s brain and caused a rare form
of meningitis,and fell into a coma with his worried mother by his side.
Sam was infected with a parasitic roundworm,
Angiostrongylus cantonensis, commonly called “rat lungworm”.
The disease can only fully mature inside the lungs
of rats, which is where it gets its nickname from.
Infected rats pass the larvae of the parasite in their feces, which
can then be eaten by snails and slugs who, in turn, get infected.
The larvae grow while inside the snails
and slugs but do not fully mature yet.
Their life cycle finishes when rats end up eating infected snails
or slugs, and the larvae reach full adulthood inside the rats.
The disease can cause meningitis, which in general, is an
inflammation of the membrane around our brain and spinal
cord.The rare type of meningitis that Sam got from his exposure
to the infected slug, called eosinophilic meningo-encephalitis,
can cause permanent brain damage, nerve damage, and death.
When Sam finally woke up from his coma, a
full 420 days later, he was unrecognizable.
He had suffered brain damage and was paralyzed, needed
tubes to eat, and was only able to move with intense effort.
The strong rugby player, once considered “invincible” by his
mother, now needed expensive, around-the-clock medical care.
After staying in a Sydney hospital for three
years, Sam was released in a wheelchair.
He still needed 24/7 care, and his friends had to fundraise money
to help his family afford it, though they still struggled to get by.
It turns out that, not far away, an eerily similar
story happened to another teenager in Australia.
In 2008, Liam McGuigan, a high school senior
from Brisbane, was on a school football trip.
One of his classmates offered him $10 if he ate a slug.
Liam responded, “It won’t kill me.” Like Sam, he ate
the innocent looking creature and felt just fine...
at first.
It took a little while, but soon 17-year-old Liam began
to feel extremely tired, and his muscles stopped working.
At the hospital, doctors thought the issue might be his appendix.
They removed it, but within hours Liam’s
temperature rocketed as his body shut down.
They removed his clothes and covered him
in ice to try to reduce his temperature.
Alarmingly, he fell into a coma.
Doctors at the hospital pumped Liam’s body full of
steroids and told his mother to plan his funeral.
He was given a one-in-17 million chance of living.
Then, four weeks after going into a coma, he woke
up–100 pounds lighter than before, but alive.
Liam had to relearn how to do everything
again—eating, talking, and walking.
But eventually, he repeated his final year of
high school and regained 99% of his old life.
Liam was always thankful for his recovery, but one day sobering
news came out that let him know how lucky he truly was.
After eight years of living with his condition, Sam Ballard
had died, surrounded by 20 of his closest family and friends.
His last words were to his mother, and he said, “I love you.”
Humans are incidental hosts of this roundworm, which
means that the parasite is not really looking to get
to you—but if it happens to find itself in your body,
it’ll make itself at home in your central nervous system.
While it’s not contagious, the infection can spread to people
when food containing the larvae stage of the worms is consumed.
Snails and slugs are the most common culprit for carrying these small
creatures, and parts of them can be hidden in raw produce as well.
It’s believed that the mucus left behind by snails,
slugs, and other gastropods can cause infection, though
according to CDC the science on this is not clear.
For example, if a slug crawls across your lettuce,
you didn’t wash it properly, and then eat it raw.
While most of these carriers are small, the giant African land
snail, which can grow larger than a human hand, can be infected.
Yikes!
There have been incidents of the larvae of this parasite being found in
some other animals, like centipedes, freshwater shrimp, crabs, and frogs.
It’s possible that eating infected creatures raw
or undercooked could result in people becoming
infected, but there isn’t a lot of clear evidence.
However, fish are not known to spread this parasite,
so keep eating as much sushi as your heart desires.
And if you’re a fan of escargot, a French hor d’oeuvre
made with snails cooked in garlic and parsley butter,
cooking kills the parasite so there’s no need to worry.
Well, at least about rat lungworm, so
please continue to enjoy your, uh, delicacy.
However, an attempt to introduce escargot
into Brazil did lead to cases of A. cantonensis.
In the late 1980s, many Brazilians bought home kits for Giant African
Snails to sell escargot, hoping the dish would take off in the country.
It turns out that Brazilians aren’t huge fans
of escargot, and the business was short-lived.
Unfortunately, the entrepreneurial attempt led to the Giant
African Snails becoming an invasive species in Brazil.
They made themselves at home, leading to cases
of rat lungworm and two incidents of meningitis.
Most known cases of infection have been in parts of
Asia and the Pacific Islands, but there have also
been reports in the Caribbean, Africa, and Hawaii.
In one incident in Hawaii’s Big Island, Kane Tauanu’u,
a baby less than one year old, was diagnosed with A. cantonensis,
the 17th infection case in the state that year.
Kane’s mother, Santini, said that their home is
surrounded by slugs who tend to come out after it rains.
She believes that her baby was crawling around
outside and might have accidentally eaten a slug.
Santini had begged the ER doctors over and over to give Kane a blood test.
She could tell that this was no ordinary condition, but Kane had
to suffer for nine days before his mother’s insistence won out.
She refused to go home again without a
blood test, and her intuition was right.
Because children can’t always communicate their symptoms,
the infection presents differently than in adults.
Crying a lot, a bad temper, mood swings,
tiredness, and other behavior changes are common.
According to his mother, Kane was
developmentally delayed after his recovery.
She says that at 16 months old, he was as developed as a one-year-old.
But he is a happy, loving, joyful baby whose parents are
extra careful now when it comes to preventing incidents.
Another case involving a young patient,
only 7 years old, happened in Japan.
Bliss Scott was an American girl in the first
grade at an elementary school in Okinawa.
She had touched a Giant African Land Snail,
and then suffered from bad headaches.
Blood tests were taken to try and find
out what was causing her so much pain.
The results brought terrible news—Bliss was suffering from rat lungworm.
All they could do was hope the disease didn’t progress too far.
But the infection reached her brain, and
Bliss developed meningo-encephalitis.
Tragically, the young girl lost her life to the parasite.
Diagnosing this disease involves analyzing these symptoms as
well as travel and exposure to animals like snails and slugs.
Blood tests can be tricky to secure, but a PCR test can also detect A. cantonensis.
Inside the human body, the A. cantonensis larvae cannot grow or reproduce so the
parasite dies over time even with no treatment.
Those who go on to develop eosinophilic meningitis don’t
usually need antiparasitics, but symptoms can last for weeks
or months as the immune system reacts to the dying parasites.
The most common symptom of this meningitis is
a headache, which occurs in all mild cases.
Other signs include photophobia—light sensitivity,
stiffness in the neck, sensitivity to touch, tingling,
pain, facial paralysis, muscle fatigue, and vomiting.
Most treatments are to treat symptoms of infection, such as pain
medication for headaches or medication to reduce the body’s reaction to
the parasites—like the ice covering Liam when his raging fever struck.
A severe case might be indicated by a high fever
and severe headaches, as well as paralysis, pain
along areas of skin, vertigo, blindness, and a coma.
Symptoms will usually flare up one to three weeks after being
exposed to the parasite, but the duration depends on the severity
of the case, normally lasting between two to eight weeks.
People who do get infected with this roundworm
actually don’t need any treatment in most cases.
Some cases don’t have any symptoms while others
only display mild symptoms that don’t last long.
And if patients progress to a severe case of meningitis
like Liam’s, treatment will vary on a case-by-case basis.
While cases of death-by-snail are rare, it’s important to be
very safe with what you eat and follow a few simple guidelines.
Don’t ever eat raw or undercooked critters that can
carry this roundworm, and wash your fruits and veggies
carefully–especially leafy vegetables like lettuce!
Remember to wash your hands after possible exposure, and before you eat.
And if you’re travelling in an area where the
parasite is common, avoid eating uncooked vegetables.
Finally, if you see a Giant African Land Snail around, it’s best to admire
it from afar and not touch it, unless you want to become an escar-ghost!