About Health & Medicine

Although occasionally cysts rupture, they usually signal their presence by causing pressure on some organ or a lump in the abdomen becomes noticeable.

Diagnosis may not be easy. X-rays or scans of the liver using radioactive marker chemicals are not specific; what they confirm is the presence of a lump.

Several other tests using injections of serum into the skin have been in use for many years but they are not always accurate.

Some researchers have come up with a novel treatment in experimental animals, where the inner fluid of the cyst is removed and replaced with serum from an infected animal. Presumably the antibodies contained in the serum destroy the parasite. This has not been transferred to the treatment of humans.

Recently the use of drugs previously used to kill worms in animals has been successfully tried in man. Mebendazole and its derivatives have a low level of toxicity and show promising results.

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Cats are clean animals — but they can be a danger to pregnant women.

They pose the risk of the condition called toxoplasmosis.

In most cases, this is a mild human infection but, if a woman gets it for the first time during pregnancy, severe damage can occur to the foetus.

Toxoplasma gondii is a minute one-celled animal which appears to be a natural parasite of the cat, but for which other animals, some birds and even reptiles may act as intermediate hosts.

Oocysts or eggs may be passed with the faeces and be a source of infection.

Contact with the cat’s litter-tray or gardening without gloves in soil where the faeces may be buried can infect humans.

Eating improperly cooked meat, which may contain the oocysts, is another source of infection, if not the main one. Blood tests show that most of us eventually come into contact with the parasite, which appears to be widespread in most countries, although infections are often mild and undiagnosed.

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