Rat Lungworm

[hotinhawaii]

pbmaise, that 24 y.o. kid was Graham McCumber. Here is a recent news article about him: http://westhawaiitoday.com/news/local-ne...bilitating

[pbmaise]

Thank you hotinhawaii.

This is indeed who I met. I met Graham before the injury. I met Kathleen at the hospital as she stood by her son's side 24/7.

Here is paragraph from article.

For Hilo resident Kathleen Howe, rat lungworm came calling in 2008 when her son, Graham McCumber, now 30,became ill with the disease. McCumber fell into a coma from which he was expected to never emerge. Six years into a painful recovery with extensive vitamins and alternative medicine therapy, he lives with extensive nerve damage.

Philip

ps I strongly support the movement away from the typical American diet, however highly discourage the extremes some go to. Cooked taro leaves is a traditional healthy, environmentally friendly, and 100% safe.

[terracore]

Does anybody know if the nematodes are killed by freezing?

[DoryGray]

Presentation by Dr. Susan Jarvi, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Daniel K. Inouye College of Pharmacy, on Wednesday, April 15, 6:30-7:30 p.m., in UCB Room 100.

http://www.bigislandvideonews.com/2015/0...s-renewed/

[Wao nahele wahine]

Here's a link to a video posted by Mark Kimura on Facebook. The video is interviews with Rat Lungworm survivors, and with Dr. Susan Jarvi and Kay Howe. IMHO, it's an hour well spent watching this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r88WNCxAjQ8

Wahine

[MarkP]

I don't doubt that rat lungworm is real and that many of these people had it. It's a serious threat. All the more reason to filter out the bull. I don't doubt that there were cases where doctors were not sufficiently aware. Nevertheless there is a huge amount of armchair self-diagnosis going on here and a huge glorification of anecdotal evidence. Spouses who sit next to each other and validate each others stories do have some benefit but there is also the risk that one is just mindlessly going "Uh-huh", at the right moments out of a sense of duty. If you accept the general message of this videos one must believe that the medical community is worse than useless and the untrained general public must be believed without skepticism, as though diagnosing obscure diseases were easy and there is no such thing as a hypochondriac.

I am perhaps biased by having watched an earlier video about rat lungworm in which a room full of people were asked if they had had it. Dozens of people raised their hands, the majority of the audience it seemed to me. That video also had stories of how doctors had failed to diagnose the condition. The message seemed to be that the doctors knew nothing, that the majority of the audience had been infected, and that they were able to diagnose themselves where the doctors had not been able to. I am just doing a reality check. The vast majority of us are alive today because the medical community CAN and DOES help us.

[Wao nahele kane]

Unfortunately tropical disease isn't isolated to its place of origen. Because Hawaii is a tropical island it is subject to the indoctrination of formerly not present (to this State) tropical diseases from around the world. That alone places a challenge on the States medical community which isalready challeged in other ways. Where there are many tropical disease yet to come, there will be many instances of inability to diagnose based on the preconception that such an illness is not yet here in this State and therefore the tendency to either miss diagnose or be unaware of a newly itroduced disease will remain elevated here moreso than other States.

There was a research group up at macuu market looking for volunteers in Puna to take test to determine whether or not they had been subject to the parasite. This would indicate people can be infected and survive without knowledge of being infected by ratlung.

[lavalava]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Wao nahele kane


There was a research group up at macuu market looking for volunteers in Puna to take test to determine whether or not they had been subject to the parasite. This would indicate people can be infected and survive without knowledge of being infected by ratlung.

---

there is a chance of being `slightly`infected and feeling extended flu like sysmptoms but ultimately recovering...

[PunaMauka2]

For some reason slugs absolutely love to slime around in folded up tarps laying around near ground level. Now I keep them stored in a place I'm sure they won't get to.

[Midnight Rambler]

MarkP: part of the problem is that it's very difficult to diagnose rat lungworm disease, period. You don't produce antibodies like with a regular infectious disease, so it's only if you develop serious meningitis that it can be diagnosed for sure, and then only with a spinal tap. On top of that, the worms don't actually reproduce in the human body like bacteria or viruses do, so how sick you get depends on how many you ingest in the first place. That leaves a lot of room for people who probably have gotten sick with something, but maybe not RLD, to self-diagnose without it being even possible to contradict them. And while it's likely many didn't really have it, some of them probably did have it for real, because it's not always debilitating like the obvious cases.