Revista de patología y enfermedades infecciosas

Abstracto

The Reason Why Everyone is obsessing About Human Taeniases

Akira Ito

Taeniases caused by two species, the pork tapeworm, Taenia solium and the beef tapeworm, Taenia saginata, and ‘Asian Taenia’, Taenia saginata asiatica, are briefly overviewed. Among these tapeworms, T. solium is unique and has serious public health importance, since it causes cysticercosis, especially neurocysticercosis, the most potentially lethal helminthic disease in humans, when tapeworm carriers and others get egg ingestion. Cysticercosis is crucially different from taeniasis, since the former is transmitted from human (tapeworm carriers) to humans including the tapeworm carriers themselves. These tapeworm infections, especially T. solium and T. saginata asiatica are exclusively endemic in remote areas where local people defecate out-doors and pigs have free access to human feces. Pigs are contaminated with eggs of these tapeworms in human feces and harbor huge number of the larval stage, cysticerci of T. solium. In contrast, although pig is only confirmed domesticated animal harboring cysticerci of T. saginata asiatica in the liver, the cysticerci have never been fully developed. The endemic areas are remote or rural areas in developing countries in Asia where the owners of these domesticated animals sacrifice them in the backyard of their houses and serve uncooked or undercooked meat and viscera without meat inspections at all. The endemic areas for both T. solium and T. saginata asiatica are often crucially different from T. saginata. It is affected from the religion. In Muslim societies, T. solium taeniasis is not endemic. In non-Muslim societies, T. solium is more common than T. saginata. Even though taeniases are endemic in remote areas, CC including NCC is becoming cosmopolitan distribution. Such crucial difference between taeniases and CC in Asia is overviewed.