Symptoms
With initial infection, some patients have reported remembering a mild fever and flu-like symptoms about a month previous to extraction or identification of worm. The most common symptom is the complaint of sensation of a worm moving around the mouth, near the lips, and in the soft palate area. This movement is normally engendered by immature adult female worms. Symptoms, once noted, may continue from a month to a year if the worm is not surgically extracted. Eosinophilia is noted in some patients. Gongylonemiasis is the affliction caused by this parasite, which is simply protracted discomfort or sensation of movement in the buccal, oral or gingival areas associated with a sensation of foreign body. Subjects commonly pull worms from their gums, tongue, lips, and inner cheeks after days and even weeks of reported discomfort. In animals, this parasite quickly spreads down the esophagus, and into the upper digestive and respiratory tracts, making it more often than not, fatal. For humans, this parasite never makes it further than the oral cavity, and is often surgically or manually extracted.
Read more about this topic: Gongylonema Pulchrum
Famous quotes containing the word symptoms:
“Protest, evasion, merry distrust, and a delight in mockery are symptoms of health: everything unconditional belongs in pathology.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the “easy life of the gods” would be a lifeless life.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)