Doctors Remove 6-Foot-Long Tapeworm from Man's Gut

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Picture a clown's endless scarf gag ... but with a tapeworm

Doctors are telling of a remarkable medical case in which they had to a remove a 6-foot-long tapeworm from a man's gut by pulling it through his mouth.
Live Science explains that the 48-year-old patient from India had been having stomach pains for two months before he decided to visit PVS Memorial Hospital in Kerala.
During a colonoscopy, doctors discovered a segment of a pork tapeworm, a common sign that a larger tapeworm is hiding elsewhere in the body.
Doctors then maneuvered a camera into the man's upper intestine, where they found what Dr. Cyriac Philips describes as the longest tapeworm he's ever seen.

The worm was curled up, but as doctors began slowly pulling it out through the patient's mouth in what must have felt like an endless scarf gag, its size became clear.
In the end, it measured a little over 6 feet long, doctors write in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The patient—who was kindly sedated during the 1.5-hour procedure—likely became infected after eating raw or undercooked pork, per the CDC.
Those who have tapeworms often don't know it because they're typically symptom-free. (A 20-foot-long tapeworm caused a man to lose 22 pounds in three days.)

[Freedomofspeech]

1. That looks like the stuff that's wrapped around tRump's head.

[Sherman A1]

2. Wow

[Nitram]

3. Six feet? That's nothing.

According to the National Center for Biotechnology, tapeworms are some of the largest parasites of man, with the longest growing up to 25 meters (82 feet.) However, most tapeworms grow to a maximum length of 2 to 15 meters (6 to 49 feet). I had a 15 foot tapeworm when I was living in Bogota. That story about some guy losing 22 pounds in 3 days due to a 20-foot tapeworm is clearly apocryphal.