OMFG I think that was a TAPEWORM! Help! (warning gross stuff in this post)

[madamez]

OK so went to have a quick pee and, on lifting the lid, spotted something wriggling in the pan. Oh, methinks, a caterpiller, tough luck on it... wait a minute....It was white and segmented and had a kind of long, darker tail. And I have been Googling pictures of tapeworms and now I am petrified! How did I get that? How can I cure it? Arrgh!

miserablemoralvacuum, please, oh please, add some genuine zoologically enlightening true facts about parasites!

(and debunk this nonsense about tapeworms coming out of anyone's mouth. Also, M Callas did not apparanly deleiberately infect herself, she was plagued by tapoeworms because she loved steak tartre and other raw meat products).

But genuine horrorfest info is good

hoholepew:

tapeworms don't come out your mouth since they couldn't get far enough up and survive the process: your stomach is full of acid at pH 2. As most of us know intuitively from heartburn.

Blu... zoologically enlightening facts about parasites. Hmmm let's see. Well I spose the place to start (gather round, children ) is asking if you know how they're all related to each other/us/ trees etc.?

Did you know there are some plants that are parasites? (not in the sense of merely being epiphytes, but actually living under the skin of a crab)

Did you know parasites can modify behaviour n animals - making the animal more likely to pass on the parasite to its next host?

Did you know that there are threadworms that live under beer mats?

ohhh at this time of year you just need to wave your bare backside at a mince pie.. it'll soon pop out

Bloody spoilsports.

how did the threadworm get under the beermat? in the first place?

plumpud - shop bought or home made?

Oh, I have no doubt that we are related to parasites - there are several healthy specimins in my family.

The beermat ones....do they live in humans, too? eurgghhh. skanky sticky pub tables...

I don't think a nice little plant living under a crab shell is as bad as having a bloody great tape worm in a human being. If DP had a tapeworm, or some sort of wriggling nemotode I would make him move out. though I daresay he is infested with the beermat variety.

ugh.

What are the worms that sometimes come out of people's noses?

And the ones that come from under your skin with a terrible burning that makes you want to rush to water - where they swim out and start the next stage of life cycle? Are those guinae worms? And the ones that can come out of your leg and you wrap them round a pencil to stop them going back in?

Or are they as myhical as biscuit-loving tapeworms?

cornsilk.. has to be either home assembled made or shop bought and glittered as shown on telly last night ( good ole Kirstie , now my dc's want to bloody eat glitter and that's the 14 year old)

( BCNS with xmas dress on btw)

Yes Cornsilk how do they find the beermats?

It's like the mites that live on eyelashes, how do they get there?

I cannot believe I clicked on this thread whilst eating spag bol.

this time the beer and mats are next to the monce pies ( what more of an excuse to wave your bum about in the pub do you need?)

mince* not monce.. although I'm sure that would work as well

I LOVE gross stuff like this!

My Dad once told me with a pokerface that the way to get rid of a tapeworm was to waggle a mars bar by your bum hole, wait for the greedy little mite to emerge, get someone else to grab its head and yank it out...I have actually passed this on as bona fide medical advice [gullable emoticon]

Hi BCNS

The skin ones are guinea worms, yes.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracunculiasis

There's a fantastic detective story about a mythical species of Dracunculus... Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow.

The one that was on House was a mythical combo of a guinea worm and a fish tapeworm.

Not sure which ones the nose ones are...

Beermat worms: no they're actually a species unto the beermats. But that's because nematodes are so incredibly genetically diverse that basically everything on earth has its own species or hundred... if you removed all the big things in the world and just left their parasites behind inn place of the animals, plants etc, you'd be able to reconstruct what you had before just from the diversity of nematodes.

Relationship to us:
we're in a group with other furry things, reptiles, fish, starfish, sea urchins, sea squirts...

flatworms go in a group with snails and earthworms

roundworms/threadworms go in a group with insects, crabs, centipedes

then there are all the other parasites and their friends. Potato blight (irish famine cause) goes in a group with big brown seaweeds in the sea.

What's the thing that leaps out of the water and up willies? Is that a worm or a fish?

Ah, that's the worm that can only swim up a man's willy if he is weeing in the water.

(Either that or Jordan?)

Tapeworms can travel up to your stomach though. My cat vomited one up a few months ago (I'm still traumatised)

I used to know what that was, hold on I am thinking and googling. I remember once it's there it sticks out its spines and never comes out again.

Amazonian Penis Fish!

That's DH's Christmas present sorted, then.

Bluh - this is gross!! Totatlly don't know why I opened this, and more - why did I click on the link showing it. Yuk yuk yuk

I think Skip needs to clear her search history pretty sharpish