Sorry about the delay in posts... my computer wasn't reading my SD card, so I couldn't get images from my camera to the computer, and I didn't want a bunch of posts with "and I'll get you the pictures later" all over them.
On Monday, we took a field trip to Instituto de Enfermedades Neurologicas, which is a neurology hospital where they do a lot of treatment and research on cysticercosis, a parasite (worm) infection that can travel to the brain. Most people, surprisingly enough, can have hundreds of cysts and not have any symptoms worse than headaches, which is how they remain undiagnosed long enough for them to have hundreds of cysts.
On site, they also have a museum of brains, with a few walls of specimens of brains with various diseases:
And here's a close-up of a brain with neurocysticercosis:
They also had some healthy specimens, including this one of the central nervous system:
So that was Monday. On Tuesday, we went to Instituto Alexander von Humboldt, which is a tropical medicine hospital. In the morning, we sat in on Leishmaniasis clinic (parasitic infection that causes open ulcers on the skin--got a lot of press in the early days of Iraq, when troops were being MEDEVACed with Leish after getting bitten by sandflies while they slept in the dirt), and then we rounded with one of the attending physicians, who showed us some very interesting cases, including a woman who complained of facial swelling, pain, and "worms coming from her nose". They thought she was crazy, then they actually saw maggots coming from her nose. A fly had flown up her nose and laid eggs, leading to an infection called myiasis (yes, maggots coming from the skin actually has a name). Disgusting.
Then yesterday was spent working on my presentation on Bugs of Military Significance, which is what I'll also do today. Apparently, people want to see something come out of this rotation... apparently, they aren't sending me to Peru just to sight-see for three weeks. Who knew?
3 comments:
So, one of the 3 cadaver brains I've ever personally removed from a cadaver looked a little like your holey brain picture. They didn't have an explanation of it when we were working on our cadaver... but thought since it was a preserved cadaver and all, that it was probably harmless for us to handle it, etc. Hope they were right! :) Anything else that causes holey brains that you noticed while you were looking at the wall of brains? Very interesting place.
Well, they had a lot of cysticercosis there (one of the walls was just cysticercosis brains), so the differential diagnosis was a little off from what you would expect in the States. I think spongiform encephalopathies (ie, CJD) would probably look similar, but I haven't seen one. I know toxoplasmosis and metastatic cancer in the brain would look similar on CT, but I don't know what they would look like in preserved brains.
As long as you were wearing gloves, you should be fine :)
My personal guess was CJD also, and I wasn't sure how prions were/are affected by preservation...
The woman died of old age, officially, and they had no reason to suspect CJD, I guess, or anything else unusual with her brain, for that matter. We'll probably never know. She is long cremated. (But, her brain was the one and only set of pictures I ever took of my cadaver dissections).
Post a Comment