P.O.W.s alerted to worm risks

Press, 3 February 1984, Page 6

P.O.W.s alerted to worm risks

NZPA-AAP London Survivors of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps in South-East Asia during World War II have been warned that they could be carrying potentially fatal parasites. Doctors in Britain were urging the thousands of veterans to volunteer for check-ups, “The Guardian” reported yesterday. The danger came from tiny worms called strongyloides, which, unlike others of their ilk, can reproduce inside the human body. Research by Dr Dion Bell and his team at the School of Tropical Medicine in Liverpool suggested that one in seven of the 20,000 British survivors may still be carrying the worms. The normal symptom was recurrent itchy skin rash in the shape of a wavy red line. If the infection was spotted the worms could be killed with a three-day course of drugs.

If the victim’s immune system was depressed, either by illness or by treatment with drugs such as cortisone, the worms were

able to reproduce freely. That resulted in severe diarrhoea, paralysis of the gut, bacterial peritonitis, and — if the worms reached the brain — meningitis.

“We have treated about 150 patients over the last few years,” Dr Bell said. The soldiers generally had picked up the worms while working barefoot on the “Burma railway.” The tiny baby worms penetrated the skin and made their way to the lungs and then the intestines. The worms settled in the small intestine and reproduced. If the larvae hatched before they passed out of the body, they may turn sideways, burrow through the intestinal wall, enter a blood vessel and go round the body. They end up in the lungs, are coughed up in sputum, swallowed again and develop into adults. “Other worms die of old age and boredom, but these things reproduce inside you,” Dr Bell said. “That’s why we are still seeing the infection in soldiers who were in the jungles 40 years ago.”