08-09-2015, 03:11 PM
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.