Most of the time , MD know what ’s ripe for you . But nearly 400 years ago , this may not have been quite so clean cutting off . An autopsy of a seventeenth - century mummy discovered in a grave in South Korea has revealed theearliest known causa of liver parasitesin a human , and he may well have been taint while trying to cure another disease .
The body belongs to a man mention Jing Lee , who conk out in 1642 at the age of 63 . Lee lived during the Joseon Dynasty , during which the deadened were mummify in a manner that managed to preserve the bodies in exquisite detail . How exactly this was achieved is still not full realise .
After gaining permit from the decedents of Lee , researcher from theDankook University College of Medicineput his 375 - year - old trunk through a CT scanner to peek in spite of appearance at his internal organs . In addition to finding that they were squished to one side , most potential as a result of gravitational force , they also make out a large tidy sum within the liver just below the contraceptive diaphragm .
The team then murder the strange puffiness to get a better expression at it , and found that it take quite a large number of epenthetic fluke ball . compose in theJournal of Parasitology , they were able to key out them as belong to the parasite known asParagonimus westermani . The fluke is usually carried by freshwater crustacean , and when consumed penetrate through the enteral wall and into the peritoneal cavity . From here , the good fortune then either goes through the diaphragm and into the lungs , or heads for the liver as they did in Lee .
It mean that Lee was most probably bear from hepaticparagonimiasiswhen he finally kvetch the bucket , making him the oldest cognize case of the disease . Symptoms of this let in a fever , abdominal pain , and diarrhea .
The irony here is that he may have contracted the disease after eating raw mollusk on the passport of a medico . At the time of Lee ’s death , eat raw crayfish and crab was common within the Joseon acculturation , with doctors during this period think that imbibe raw crayfish juice was an efficacious mode to treat measles .
While there is no hard evidence to show that Lee had been suffering from morbilli , the researchers speculate that it could well have been a mechanism by which he acquired the parasitic transmission in the first place .
Four centuries later and people are still being infected byP. westermaniafter eating inadequately cooked crabmeat or shellfish . It is thought that 22 million people are infected every year worldwide , with most of these shell being in Southeast Asia .
[ H / T : New Scientist ]
