Curious Incident of the Guinea Worm in the Dog

Humans have waged a decade-spanning war of extinction against the parasitic Guinea worm. With cases down roughly 99.99 percent from 1986, it would seem the struggle is nearly at an end. Now our inhuman adversary has found a new place to hide -- and that place is man's best friend.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to have to Blow Your Mind from stop work
dot Com. Hey, welcome to stept about your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and my name is Christian Sager.
So I think both of us share a favorite intro
scene to a movie. We're talking about The Thing John

(00:25):
Carpenter's remake of The Thing at the beginning. Yeah, not
the not the recent one from What Was It Like?
Which also had the dog in it and I and
I have to admit I enjoyed that sequel prequel remake. Yeah,
I didn't hate it as much as some other people did.
But that movie opens with a dog running across an

(00:45):
Arctic landscape, but the helicopter chasing it, and people shooting
from the helicopter at the dog, trying to kill this
dog desperately, and it arrives at an American camp and
they can't figure out why. I believe they're Norwegian, right,
people shotting in Norwegian, raging about this dog, trying to
kill it, and uh, yeah, it's a it's a factless
opening scene because it's you start with the chase. Everyone's

(01:07):
interested in a chase, and then it seems so bizarre,
like what why is this poor innocent dogg Eve, there's
a point where they aren't They like thrown grenades at
it from a helicopter. I've seen it. I definitely remember
the shooting. Yeah yeah, so, Uh. The reason why we're
bringing this up is because, of course we're big horror
monster fans here, and what we're gonna talk about today

(01:28):
is probably the closest thing in real life we have
to a horrific monster like the Thing, uh that infects
human bodies and apparently can now infect dog bodies just
like the Thing did. Yeah, we see a similar situation
playing out with the guinea worm because in the Thing,
of course, uh, this parasitic shape shifting organism from another

(01:48):
world or another string of world has been almost defeated
at this Norwegian outpost and it's fled to the place
in this dog and this is it's it's vessel to
try and reach another place of safety, and they're trying
to kill it first. Uh. And we we actually see
this scenario taking place to a certain extent with the game.

(02:10):
One of my favorite things about this which you covered
this previously for How Stuff Works now and in a
short video that you you out there can find both
on now do How Stuff Works dot com, but also
on our social media channels we shared it. You did
an article in a video, and this is sort of
our deeper dive into that. But you have this great
sentence in there that I loved. You said, man maybe

(02:32):
may indeed be the warmest hiding place, but man's best
friend will do in a pinch. That's that's my favorite
tagline for this. Well, because man is the warmest hiding
place is from the thing, Yeah yeah, yeah, And indeed
that's kind of what's going on here. Yeah. So it
also reminds me the guinea worm and this it just

(02:54):
brought up a bunch of horror movie sci fi kind
of possibilities to me when we started really researching how
this thing works. Also made me think of Alien three
uh in in one of the cuts. There's two different
cuts of that movie, but in one of them, the
xenomorph infects a dog instead of a human, right, and
that that is supposed to explain why it takes this
more Canine the sweeker for like a uh morphology, it

(03:18):
has a different biology somehow because uh, the parasite grew
in a dog, uh and burst out of a dog,
And we are talking today about a parasite that also
grows in a dog and burst out of it. Although
from all the research we've done, it doesn't seem like
there's a ton of real, like journal published science about

(03:40):
the dog infestation with guinea worms. So we're not quite
sure actually if the guinea worms that come out of
these dogs are all that different, uh, physically than they
are when they come out of human beings. But the
the process is certainly different. Yeah. Indeed, so let's let's
back up. We'll just talk for a minute about the
organism itself and then we'll get more into this human

(04:02):
versus guinea worm fight. We're talking about the guinea worm
drachen Kulis medinansis, which is a nematode or round worm uh.
And we're talking about a pretty ancient critter here, a
lineage of organisms that that are honed by up to
eight billion years of evolution. Now that this is the

(04:23):
actual estimates here very dependent on who's doing the research.
But OSU zoologist George point Air, who literally wrote the
book on nematodes uh, says that the oldest known nematodes
are from around four hundred million years ago. But he
but he theorizes that they probably date back around a
billion years, meaning that they'd be be one of the

(04:45):
oldest of all life forms, emerging before almost all other
animals and just after bacteria, protozoa and fun guy. Yeah,
so one thing that I read said that the ancient
Egyptians were dealing with this we we we know that
we found it in their in their eatings, and they
had some terrible treatments for how to deal with what
we today called guinea worm disease, one of which involved

(05:06):
eating goat feces. They assumed that eating that would somehow
make the worm come out. Well, yeah, it was probably
used in a combination with other elements because, as Joe
and I explored in the Tears of Ray episode, Uh,
they dealt with the ancient Egyptian use of honey. They
had a lot of the us to honey. They used
honey and wax and a lot of their medicinal treatments. Uh.
There was one example of crocodile feces being used in contraceptives,

(05:32):
and nfecs also pops up in traditional Chinese medicine from
time to time, to say nothing of of modern fecal transplants.
So I don't want to demonize. Oh, I wouldn't know.
And and and let's be honest here, like we're while
we're we're gonna get into it. We're on the verge
of eradicating the guinea worm, actually, but it's taken us

(05:52):
as a as a species a very long time to
kind of figure out how this whole process works and
how to attack it, because they're they're a hearty adapt
of organism. Nematodes themselves. You can find them, you can
find them on mountaintops, you can find cold around deep
sea thermal vents. So the nematodes as a whole are
highly successful, and the guinea worm has also managed to

(06:15):
cling onto its position as a as a human parasite.
I actually read that nematodes in general may comprise nine
percent of all life that's on the ocean floor, and
there may be up to ten million different species overall.
But when we're talking about the ones that quote unquote
infect humans, there's only a hundred and thirty eight, Only

(06:36):
a hundred and thirty eight of the ten million climb
inside of us and and burst back out in somewhere
other I'm pretty certain I didn't follow this tangent, but
as I was researching this and doing some searches. Occasionally
I forget reach one of those topics where you absolutely
cannot search it with without Google scholar on because you
start getting stuff. Yeah yeah, and uh, and this was

(06:58):
one because I think I found more than a couple
of instances where people are saying nematodes are actually aliens. Um,
and you'll find the same thing with like fun Guy,
I bet that's a topic that our producer, Knowl's other show,
Uh stuff they don't watch, should probably cover more that
they might have covered before. The idea that nematodes are aliens. Yeah, okay,

(07:21):
I'll buy it for now. We've already connected it to
the movie Alien and the movie The Thing. So from there,
I mean, logically it has to be abled. All we
have to do is then connect these ancient aliens to
the Old Testament. And Uh. The weird thing about these
about nematodes in particular, is we have entire departments at
universities that are dedicated to studying these things, but they're

(07:42):
dedicated to studying how to kill them because of the
issues like guinea worm disease. And then also a number
of nematodes are also crop concerns too. Yeah, so you
have a definite health and uh and food interest in
eradicating them, not so much studying them and learning from

(08:03):
them exactly or like where they came from and and
like what their influences on our ecology. And I immediately
started thinking about the recent episode we did on mosquito factories,
and we started reading about how to eradicate an entire
species like the guinea worm. I thought, well, what's the
effect going to be on the local ecology? Um? And

(08:23):
that doesn't seem to be something people are very concerned
about in this literature. They want to get rid of
this thing or explore though in this episode you do
see an unbalancing when you start messing with the organism.
The organism messes back. One other thing about the ancient
history of the guinea worm. They show up in the
Old Testament. That's how old they are, how long we've

(08:45):
been dealing with them, And they're referred to as fiery
serpents in there, I would imagine because of the burning
sensation when they exit the human body. But instead of
being thought of as a worm, they were thought of
as a serpent. So all right, that's sort of the
background history of how long we've been dealing with it, Robert,
how what's the life cycle of this thing? So like

(09:05):
let's talk about it as if like this was like
a xenomorph infection. Okay, so like how's it get in,
how's it breed, how's it reproduced? And then how's it
get out? Well, luckily, this one's pretty pretty straightforward. I'm
always interested in parasites, and I'm especially interested in those
life cycle charts you always see for them when you
look them up on CDC or or other sources. Like
that's that's like a standard graphic in any kind of

(09:28):
explanation of how these things work. And some of them
are really byzantine with multiple um you know, with with
multiple host organisms with different different phases and different branches.
This one is is a pretty simple circle, although it
doesn't go directly into human beings, does it. No, it
basically what will happen. We're gonna start with the water here,

(09:50):
so you're gonna have some compromised water, and the larva
have already infected tiny fresh water copa pods. Yeah they're small,
but they're small, and that we can filter them out.
We'll talk about that later. There's some strategies for how
to do such a thing. Yeah, So you you end
up drinking in unfiltered drinking water that contains the coca pods.
Then the copa pods wind up in your stomach and

(10:11):
that's when they the larva breakout of their their previous host.
Then they tunnel their way through the stomach and intestinal
walls and they mature and breed inside the human abdominal cavity.
So they turn your abdominal cavity basically into a sex
came right, Yeah, And so we're talking about males and
females because they're breeding, and the female is what's important

(10:35):
here because that's the the version of the guinea worm
that makes its way out of your body. Right once,
once the male has has finished um making sweet nematode
love inside your abdominal cavity, it dies in your abdominal cavity. Man,
So it's just all it knows is that copa pod
is a baby. And then just the inside of our
abdoms right, that the rest of the universe is m

(10:57):
is just unknown to the male limato, but the fertilized female,
because fertilized to this foot point, she migrates to the
surface of the host skin and they typically surface on
the lower body, generally on the legs or the feet,
and they cause a painful, painful blister um. And when
the host dips this painful blister into the water for

(11:20):
a little relief, the two generally two foot or longer
female worm possibly since it's a change in temperature, and
bursts out into the water where she then excretes her
larva to begin the cycle into The larva then infests
copa pods and then someone drinks them in. Yeah. And
one of the biological facts I read about them as well,

(11:41):
that again was very strange and stunning, is that apparently,
compared to the relative body size of a guinea worm,
the uterus and a female is huge, and that's how
it can store so many larva and spew them out.
What it immediately made me think of is a show
that we've covered on on stuff to blow your mind before,

(12:04):
the Strain and uh, sometimes the vampires and that will
just like they're basically the vampires and that if you
if you haven't seen it, go listen to our podcast episode.
But it's full of spoilers. Uh. They basically are created
by by parasitic worms and there's some scenes where the
vampires just like vomit out these worms like just like
spew like hundreds of worms out. And that's what the

(12:27):
guinea worm made me think of. It's like, if you
were looking at the whole thing with a microscope, it
would probably be like that. Yeah, if you if you
dig wormy parasites and monsters, um, the strain is well
worth checking out. Like, whatever your misgivings may be about
any of the other elements in the show, I I,
in my estimation, they're worth putting up with. Yeah, it's yeah.

(12:48):
I'm currently binge watching the second season and uh I
keep coming back from the monsters and the worms. All right, well,
speaking of coming back for the monsters and the worms,
let's take a quick break, and when we come back,
we will breakdown how this life cycle affects the human host,
how it manifests in the form of guinea worm disease.

(13:12):
All right, we're back. So okay, so we've described how
the guinea worm infects a human host, how it pops out,
but what are the what's the impact on us, what's
the impact on our bodies? And also like human society
as it's infected by these things. Right, So, the the
entire human portion of the life cycle here we've discussed

(13:33):
takes about a year, and after a year that's when
you begin to experience symptoms as a host. And the
typical symptoms are fever, itching, nausea, of vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness.
So you know these can be bad, but this is
nothing like super crippling at this point, right, right, But
think about it, like, you have no idea what happened,

(13:55):
because it's been a year since you drank that, so
you just all of a sudden start feeling terrible. It
could be that those are all symptoms of I don't know,
like having a bad flu, rather than it seems like
it's harder to put one and two together in terms
of when you might have picked up the infection. Now,
if this weren't bad enough, and it's pretty bad already,

(14:15):
the problem, the real problem here is a secondary bacterial
infection commonly results in painful disability. They can disrupt the
person's ability to work, to attend school, to care for
family members, and according to the Centers for Disease Control
Prevention UH, this disability typically last eight and a half weeks,
but it can sometimes prove permanent. So this is where

(14:37):
we get into the just really horrific aspect of guinea
worm disease because it takes you out of I mean,
at least for eight and a half weeks. Can you
imagine just being being crippled. I'm able to go to
work there for loved ones, uh, etcetera, for for that
space of time. Um. And this this is a point
I really want to hammer home before we dive even

(14:58):
further into it. The guinea worm disease is currently only
occurring in the poorest ten percent of the world's population,
and that's because they don't have access to clean drinking
water or modern healthcare. Um. So not only is it
a symptom of poverty of being poor, but itself causes

(15:21):
poverty through the disability that we're talking about here. If
you're out, you can't work for eight and a half sorry, yeah,
eight eight and a half weeks. Uh, Well, that's going
to impact your livestock you're farming, right, which is how
most of the people in these areas are making a living.
And I also want to emphasize on this burning that
we talked about, right, We mentioned the fiery serpent, So

(15:42):
it I mean I haven't had this before. But the
way that it's described as literal burning, as if like
you're on fire or something which makes you the host
want to go to the water. You're talking specifically about
the blister here, Yeah, and the blister of the time
forms on the lower part of your body. So all
you have to do is put maybe the blisters on

(16:03):
your foot, put your foot in some water. Uh. We
believe that it's because the nematode senses this temperature change
of the water that's what causes it to burst out.
I was immediately thinking like, oh, I wonder if like
one way to do this is just like put your
foot in like a bucket of ice and in the
worm will just like come out. But clearly that's not

(16:23):
the case, because the actual removal of these worms is. Man,
this is some grizzly stuff. Like this is one of
those episodes where I get like a little like grossed out.
To remove the worm, it's not only very painful, it's
also time consuming. It's not like you can just take
a pair of tweezers and yank this thing out. It's
two to three ft long inside your body. Uh. So

(16:45):
then the other the other problem here is that if
it breaks during the removal, the remaining part of the
female worm will withdraw back into the human body degrade,
and that's going to cause even more pain and swelling.
It will then spill it's larvae into your tissues, which
can lead to more infection and even possibly death. So

(17:06):
here's how they remove these worms. They get the uh
top end out of the blister, and they wind that
around a piece of gauze or a small stick, and
they manually extract it slowly. And when I say slowly,
I don't mean like an hour or two. It can
take days or weeks to get one of these things

(17:27):
out of a human body. And without proper care, the
warm wound itself can become infected by bacteria like you
you mentioned before. So you've not only got to worry
about the bacteria that can possibly happen from it just
bursting out, but then there's the potential infection that comes
if it breaks while you're pulling one out, and then
there's the potential infection of just not having the wound cleaned. Uh.

(17:51):
So there's a lot of complications. These can result in
all kinds of post symptoms, boils, lockjaw, sepsis, and more so,
the disease causes severe disability, so much so that when
they've people like the Carter Center have done the math
on this, they've figured out that it's worth millions of

(18:12):
dollars each year in farm work that isn't done because
of people that are infected by this. So it's difficult
to move around because of the pain. Subsequently they can't
do their work. Uh, it's it's really you know, it
doesn't kill these people most of the time, but it's
fairly traumatizing both to their lifestyle and physically, and I
would imagine mentally. All Right, so let's talk about the

(18:35):
war on the guinea worm. If you go back to
the nineteen eighties, um backs the around nineteen eight six,
you would find a pretty bad situation in terms of
guinea worm infection. Twenty one African and Asian countries at
the time we're experiencing a combined at three point five
million cases of an of guinea worm infection. So this

(19:00):
E d C launched the guinea worm Eradication Program in
night and the Carter Foundation soon took the lead. Yeah,
and we should mention we're here in Atlanta recording the
Carter Center's just down the road from US I drive
by it every day on my way to work. And UH,
in grad school, spent a lot of time over there
and in the Carter Library, UM because I was studying

(19:24):
presidency in rhetoric. And one of the things I really
wanted to mention here, I don't want to be political,
but Jimmy Carter's post presidency work is absolutely stunning and inspiring.
Like if every president left office and did like he did,
I think it would just be like a huge role
model to people going forward. I think he's been building houses,

(19:46):
fighting guinea worm. He's even vowed to make sure that
the last guinea worm dies before he does. And he's
been diagnosed with cancer in the last like two years, right,
I think he beat that. He's in remission, I believe, yeah,
But cancer can't stop him exactly anyone. Um. And And
I just want to point out to one of the
things that I learned when I was doing research over there.

(20:06):
His farewell addressed UH when he left the presidency is
pretty interesting because he basically spells out all the things
that he went on to do for forty years after
he left office. UM or almost forty years but he
he kind of said, like, these are the things that
are important to me, and then he goes out and
he sticks to it, you know, like he's just he's
a real interesting guy. But without the Carter Center, the

(20:29):
we wouldn't be as close to eradicating uh, this being
this this some people call it an alien. Some people
think it's an alien, the nematode guinea worm from the
face of the planet. I mean, they've really made it
their mission and invested millions of dollars in this. Yeah,
by twenty fifteen, eradication efforts and we'll go into we're

(20:50):
going to get into some of the specifics of it
here in a second, but the the overall eradication efforts
have reduced infections by nine He just yeah, there were
just twenty two cases in four different countries, and as
of right now, or at least as of earlier this
week when I was researching it, only seven cases. It

(21:12):
popped up in twenty and that's despite the dog thing
that we're going to talk about later that the twists. Yeah,
there's still only seven and those four countries, by the way,
South Sudan, Molly, Chad, and Ethiopia. So I want to
hammer this home as well. This is considered when when
it happens, if they are eradicated, it will be the
biggest medical triumph, one of them in modern history. The

(21:35):
only thing even close to this is when we ended smallpox. Uh.
And it's estimated that the Carter Center has averted eighty
million cases of guinea worm disease with their campaign. So
I mean that's fantastic. Yeah. I mean when you think
of the just the collective amount of suffering that has
been reduced by this effort, it's pretty many. Yeah, there's that.

(21:58):
And then again there's the part of me that has
been doing this show for a while and thinks, yeah,
but what about like we're going to eradicate an entire
species off the face of the planet. I wonder what
the results of that are going to be well, which
we may be seeing now with their entry into canine exactly.
So some of these key the key tactics involved here
in fighting ginny worm and the and these uh, these

(22:20):
tactics come from CDC and the and the Carter Foundation. Uh.
The big one, of course is managing the drinking water.
That means making sure that that you have safe drinking
water sources such as borehole wells and dug wells or
springs with productive walls around them and caps to prevent
to prevent infected people with worms emerging from waiting and

(22:43):
contaminating the water. You want flowing water sources, water treatment
mesh to filter out those infected coke pods. That's this
is really one of the huge area. So a lot
of these efforts have been involved with just managing water sources.
So I spent all day yesterday researching this for the epoch.
So and uh, we use a brit of filter, one

(23:03):
of those like kind of things, you know, you fill
fill it up in the sink, sits in your fridge filters,
and then you drink the water. And I drink a
lot of water during the day while I'm working, and
I was just pouring it out and just thinking, like
what what's in here? But like like there's the filter
on this thing, but I don't know what what's in
here that I'm drinking and swallowing and getting into me
right now. And then I thought, you're in You're lucky.

(23:25):
You're in the first world society. You probably don't have
to worry about uh drech um kuliasis. Yeah, now on
the subject of filters, one of the more notable filter
methods out there is something known as life straw. So
it was produced by Vestor Guard in cooperation with the
Carter Foundation. Work started on it and around nineteen and

(23:47):
this is basically originally they were looking at a cloth
filter system, but then it evolved into a simple straw
like it's basically a personal uh water filtration system where
you you put the strong the water, you suck the
water up into your mouth and it filters out the
infected copa pods UM and and they since evolved this
into a number of different filteration systems like you know,

(24:09):
family size, larger implementations of it. And I believe the
stuff you should know even did an episode on the
Live Strap back in check that out and more about it.
But it's just one of several different different efforts that
have been put forth to combat anywhere. I picture it
is kind of like UM giver have urban mate before,

(24:30):
and like the traditional way like urban mate is supposed
to be presented in UM like a specific kind of
wooden cup and then you take a metal straw and
it has a filter on the pod. It's a little
different than green tea. It's it's um, I believe Brazilian
or maybe maybe Argentineans at all. Oh, it's great stuff.

(24:50):
I I like it quite a bit. But one year
my wife got me because I like it. She got
me the straw and the the cup, the traditional cup
that you put the stuff in. And that's what I
think of when I think of the lifestra, although I
don't think the filter in an urban mate stra is
quite like powerful enough to get rid of copa pods.

(25:11):
So on top of filtration, vector control is important health
education and community mobilization, like just educating people about what
these things are and where the risks associated with them
are to be found. Case containment is big. A case
of guinea worm disease is considered to be contained when,

(25:31):
first of all, the person is identified within twenty four
hours of the worm emerging, um the person has not
entered any water source since the worm has emerged, the
person receives proper treatment and case management by a local
health provider, and within seven days of the worm emerging,
a guinea worm Eradication program supervisor determines that all the

(25:52):
above criteria have been met in the case is truly
taken care of. So the thing here that the Carter
Center is really have to struggle with is that it's
not about as much of like that they're going around
like with flamethrowers killing guinea worms right Like, It's not
like that. It's more about community based intervention where you're
educating people and changing their behavior in these areas that

(26:14):
are so heavily affected. So they mainly teach people to
filter out their water and prevent transmission. They distribute things
like the life straw we are just speaking of. Especially
if you have an emerging worm, they want you to
know the last thing you should do is go near
water because it's gonna make it worse for everybody else
in your community. Um, and they have a number of partners.

(26:35):
I just really want to quickly cover this because it's
it's it's a huge global effort that's gone into this.
So the countries that we mentioned before, South Sudan, Molly, Chad,
and Ethiopia, all their national ministries of health are involved
and they oversee elimination programs and have the staff that
kind of go out and interact with the communities. Then
the World Health Organization is also involved and it certifies

(26:58):
countries when they're worm free. I'm not quite sure how
they measure that, but there there's got to be some
kind of quantification measurement in place. I don't know. They've
analytics they use UM. And then we've talked about the
c d C, the u S Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention also here in Atlanta. UM they provide technical

(27:19):
assistance identifying the worms on site trying because sometimes worms
burst out of people's blisters and they're not actually guinea worms. Remember,
there's all those other nematodes that are capable of infecting you. UM,
so there's that as well. And then Unit SEF is
also involved and they assist by providing clean drinking water
to these communities. A couple of corporations have also been involved,

(27:39):
and they've donated more than four million dollars of non
toxic larvae side to kill the copa pods themselves that
carry the larvae UM. So they're basically like blasting the
water with this stuff. Uh. And they've also donated nylon
and then the life straws as well. The corporations with
those filters to make sure that the risk of disease

(28:00):
isn't coming from the natural water. Sources so much, and
this work is so important for the following reason. This
is a statistic on getting worm disease. If you miss
just one case, that can lead to eighty more infections
the following year. Remember it takes a year to just date.
So you miss one case, worm bursts into the water,

(28:21):
spews out its larva, somebody goes along and drinks the water,
and you've got eighty more cases a year later. And
they don't know that they're infected until a year later
when they start getting the blisters. It drives home just
how important the persistence here is. Like the scenario I
keep imagining, it's like a a really well organized Roman
legion with their shield walls and and their spears going

(28:45):
up against like an any human whore, you know. And
as long as they are persistent, if they keep, they keep,
they stay disciplined, they stay in formation, and they have
they keep, they keep their focus on the long fight,
they are going to persevere a win. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's and it's again like it's so complicated because

(29:06):
it involves you know what it is. It involves a
lot of wicked problems, including economic scale, national boundaries, healthcare,
all that stuff. Plus education. I'm sure that there's language
boundaries here that are an issue as well. Uh yeah.
And then on top of that, as we're going to
discuss after a quick break, sometimes nature throws you a curveball. Alright,

(29:35):
we're back. Yeah, And so, as Robert alluded to right
before a break, uh, this is a case of the
old Jurassic Park adage. Sometimes life finds a way, uh
and it and it has. Uh. So it turns out
that despite all of the work of the Carter Center
and others trying to eradicate the guinea worm, we have

(29:56):
just found well not just found, but it's it's just
been identified as a major problem. They're infecting dogs as
well as human beings. Now, yeah, I first read about
this as reported by NPR and the reports they did.
The worms that have been popping up in dogs and
chad since since around sometimes to the tune of sixty

(30:18):
or more parasites per hopes. Okay, let's stop for a
second and think about that. That is that's the thing
out of all of this research that just made me
absolutely go oh my god. Um, because I mean, let's
let's back up for a second. Each one of these
worms is two to three ft long or one about

(30:38):
a meter because it's not a small worm and it's
not a whole like spaghetti bowl of worms? Did the
dogs are just choked full of Imagine how painful that
must be for these poor dogs. And and uh, they're
just I mean their body mass compared to ours. So
I think I mentioned this at the top. One of
the things we haven't been able to figure out from

(30:59):
the research is do the worms grow at a rate
comparative to the size of their host? Right? So like
the like the xenomorm example, right, Like do they are
they smaller because they're in dogs? I don't know. The
other thing is, from what we've read so far, only
one female bursts out of the human host. In this case,

(31:20):
they're finding sixty worms. This isn't sixty larva, it's sixty worms.
So it's just absolutely mind blowing. It's it's heartbreaking to
think about these poor dogs too. Now, that's the important
I think that to keep in mind too about the
dogs is that if you've ever if you have traveled
to other countries, or you have you have family and

(31:41):
other countries or family origins and other countries, you you
may realize that the way that dogs are treated in
the United States. It is different from a lot of
places in the world, like the care. We treat them
as as members of our family, and we really spend
a ridiculous amount of time and energy and money on

(32:01):
sustaining their health. Oh absolutely, I mean I talk about
my dogs on the show sometimes. I'm very much a
dog person. I've got two pit bull mixes, and I
immediately started thinking about them when I was doing this research,
just thinking like, oh, I can't imagine if one of
my dogs was infected with sixty of these worms, you know.
And but your dogs are like that they stay inside

(32:23):
and they go outside and they're outside the yard. Yeah. Well,
in many places in the world, and especially and Chad,
which is the main country of focus here, the dogs
are a little more loose, you know. They're they're running
around there on their own and they come back to
the house. They're probably not sleeping in the house. They're
not getting they're not being chained up or restrained, and

(32:43):
they think that's just how how life is. Yeah. They're
more like, uh, like part of the farm, right like
as any other like sort of agricultural animal would be
on the property. They're they're kept there to protect the crops,
mainly from baboons. From what I was reading, Yeah, you
could think of them as all I mean, I hate
to throw fare all around. You can almost think of
them as sort of semi farrell because they kind of

(33:04):
have their own community going on. Um, they don't so
much as live within human society as along the Yeah, um, yeah,
I saw a lot of that, you know, Like I
grew up overseas and um lived in Singapore and traveled
around Southeast Asia a lot, and I saw a lot
of stray dogs, um, but not dogs in this sense

(33:26):
where they're like they're part of the community, like they
serve a function. Um. So I'm sure like in some
cases these people are invested in having these dogs on
their property or keeping them alive. But at the same time,
they're not building them doghouses. They're taking them to the
vet and giving them treats and teaching them to sit. Right.
They probably don't have extensive span neuter programs, right yeah, yeah,

(33:48):
and that's part of the problem because if if there
weren't the worms are in the dogs, then what are
we doing to control the dog population? The dog problem
that of course has been that is mentioned in with
the literature, the idea like, well, what if you just
wiped out all the dogs? Yeah, and that would be
cost prohibitive and also it's not a great like public relation,

(34:09):
pretty bad pr move on half of I mean, I
don't know what organization would be in charge of doing that.
I suppose it would be one of these nations health ministries,
but uh, they've actually made it clear like they're not
going to do that. Euthanizing these dogs would be not
only would it be ethically a problematic for them, but
it's also it would be the largest what is called

(34:32):
a culling project of any animal in history. There's over
ten thousand of these dogs in these countries, and a
chat in particular, I believe, so they would have to
kill ten thousand dogs to eradicate this. And then what
we're going into is a little bit later. It's not
just dogs, um so, it's it's mammals in general. So,

(34:52):
but the dogs, the dogs alongside humans, they're they're they're
in close proximity to humans. And you could probably make
an argument the dog population is an essentially invasive, unbalanced population,
much like the humans. Oh yeah, certainly. Yeah. Um so
instead of eradicating them. What are they doing? Well, the

(35:14):
Carter Foundation is supplying people with callers chains and twenty
twenty incentive payments to tie their dogs up away from
the water supply for a two week period and that's
enough time for the female worms to emerge and die
on dry land. Yeah, and I would imagine twenty dollars
is a long way in these communities. Um. And the

(35:37):
idea here is if they're chained up, they're not going
to be able to contaminate the water sources and then
spread the parasite all over again. So yeah, So there
is research that shows that it is in other mammals,
and I'm going to talk about that in a second.
But the dogs themselves, because they're living, like we said,
adjacent to these communities, they're more likely to infect humans

(35:58):
and start this process all over again them. Now, one
thing we haven't really mentioned is how the dogs specifically
are picking up the infection. Yeah, and this is entirely Yeah.
I mean, we could assume that it might be from
a water source. However, there there have been two guesses
and this leads directly into the paper I'm about to
talk about eating tadpoles or eating fish cuts um from

(36:24):
these water sources as well. I think most dog owners
and people who have been around dogs, they can sympathize
that the dog is that an extreme disadvantage since most
dogs will we'll go drink just about any water, uh huh,
and and it at least knows around in just about anything.
My dogs. Um, it's been raining here a little bit lately,
and the mosquitoes have been worse this summer than ever before,

(36:46):
as we talked about in the Mosquito fatri So, and
my dogs will go around the yard and drink anytime
there's like an indent in the dirt and the water,
uh you know, little pocket forms. My dog will drink that.
And I'm just thinking like, oh, there's so many mosquito
larva in that, But you know whatever, it's protein for them.
I guess it's biomas it is. Yeah, So okay. There

(37:10):
is a paper published in six uh in the journal
Emerging Infectious Diseases, and it's called the possible role of
fish and frogs as para tenetic hosts of dragon Coolest medinensis.
So that's the Latin term again for anywhere in this study.
The researchers purposely fed these infected copa pods that we've

(37:31):
been talked talking about two fish and two tadpoles. Specifically,
the fish were nile talapia and fat head minnow. Those
did not develop larva inside of them, but the tadpoles
did harbor small amounts. So this was connected to the
whole dog thing. Is well, if they're eating these, maybe

(37:51):
that's how they're getting them. They said. Uh, So, the
fact that the fish didn't actually demonstrate larva may not
be indicative of the fact that the fish are incapable
of passing them onto a host. It may just be
that they didn't infect them with enough larva to do so.
So what was their next step? This is also upsetting

(38:13):
to me as an animal owner. Uh. They then fed
the fish and the tadpoles to two ferrets to test out.
I used to own ferrets. I had four ferrets at
one time. Uh. One that was fed fish, it did
not develop larva. However, the one that was fed the
tadpoles did have larva. And if they did an autopsy

(38:34):
on this ferret and they found the yeah, so the
um guinea worm larva passed on and in the ferret
it probably would have grown into a worm and burst
out as it as it does in humans and now dogs,
so we know the species can survive in tadpoles as
hosts as well. Now, the study confirms their suspicions that

(38:54):
mammals in the area in general have been getting affected
with a worm. So we're talking about domestic fair it's cats, dogs,
as well as monkeys in the area to um they
can all serve as hosts for the worm. Now, as
we mentioned earlier, the dogs themselves are are more adjacent
to the communities, so they're more of a concern. But

(39:15):
according to other research has been done, researchers have known
for decades that dogs, leopards, and other mammals are in
the area can acquire similar infections, but they thought it
was from a different species of dragon coolest, not the
guinea worm. In the case of the dogs, researchers definitely
think they're spreading the worms to humans, which presumably hasn't

(39:39):
been proven yet. With these other mammals we're talking about here,
I mean, the leopards got a guinea worm by it right, Like,
we're not going to hang out next to a leopard.
We're probably not taking drinking the same water. Hopefully right right,
And I'm thinking the leopard population would also be significantly
smaller your farm dog population. So this this is all

(40:00):
rather concerning because it means that all these these efforts,
this these this decade spanning war against the guinea worm
is potentially in jeopardy because the worms have been able
to find refuge in dogs but killing other animals as well,
and therefore they're always going to have a base camp

(40:21):
from which to assault the human population. Again. Yeah, and
the thing that's very concerning about this, as we said,
they don't know where the dogs are getting these from,
which means that somewhere out there, probably in a water source,
there's still lots of guinea worm larvae. So the dogs
are acquiring it somehow. Where are they acquiring it from,

(40:42):
How are they acquiring it? Where are these tadpoles that
they might be eating, you know, or maybe they're passing
to something other than tadpoles or fish. They just don't
know yet. There there's still has is a lot of
research to be done here. You have to be interested
to see how this plays out, because that does it
mean that we can still absolutely break the cycle and
therefore or break the species, or does it mean, we're

(41:03):
never going to break the species. All we can do
is just it eliminated from the human population by just
remaining remaining persistent, like basically the Roman soldiers, and in
the metaphor here, they're gonna have to just keep fighting
forever and just not let their guard down. Or if
we circle back to the Thing as their metaphor, they're

(41:24):
just going to have to burn everything down to the
ground until that's just Kurt Russell and Keith David just
hanging out with a bottle of whiskey, just waiting to
see which one of them has a guinea worm that's
going to erupt from them first. This is this is
good that we've come back around to the to the
Thing here, because I've been thinking about a lot. I've
been writing a little bit about the Thing for the

(41:44):
upcoming Monster Science episodes, and I've been I've been thinking
about that whole scenario of like what happens when the
Thing reaches the rest of the population. It's it's proposed
in the movie if I remember correctly, and I believe
there's a comic series that did this as well, where
basically it's like out of control biomass explosion of things

(42:05):
if it gets to a major populationship. Right, the way
they showed in the movie is Wilfred Brimley has that
little like Commodore sixty four like projection, and it's like
it's like do do do? It shows like one vector
like touched as another vector, and then it's just like boom,
It just like spreads super fast. Yeah. It's like the
only reason why they were able to keep it at
bay is because they're in an isolated area. I guess

(42:28):
the same could be said here, right, is that like
because these are such impoverished nations that aren't really uh
connecting or networking in the same way as first world
nations are. Uh, that's keeping the warrant from spreading even
further as well. Although we also, I mean, if let's say,
like on the off chance, like one of us got infected, uh,

(42:52):
we would go to a doctor, the doctor would recognize
what it was, and we would be taking care of
in like a hospital or something like that. Right, Like,
we have a healthcare system in place and they would
know how to deal with it. Plus we have clean
drinking water. Yeah yeah, and also like your your first
method of treating the blister just sort of dealing with
the pain would not be to go down to the

(43:13):
local stream. You're probably going to back up. Yeah. Um. Now,
as far as the thing goes, I think when when
I try and think about it reaching the major population centers,
I think that either a, it's only going to do
what it has to do to get hold of a
spaceship and leave the plants. Who Yeah, so that's one possibility.

(43:34):
The second possibility is that it just goes crazy and
just takes over the biomass of everything, or it reaches
parasitic equilibrium, like like other creatures in our world that infiltrates,
say an aunt colony or some other kind of community
or system. Yeah, you can only go so far with it.
You don't want to kill the host. We talked about

(43:56):
this in the episode that we did on the physics
and science behind vampires drinking blood, that there's only so
far that vampires could go before they basically eradicated themselves. Right. So,
and you see that in successful parasites. You can't be
a successful parasite if you just wipe out the ship
that you need for your journey. Yeah, that's a good point.
And then back to the management thing, I wonder if

(44:19):
there's a fourth scenario in which the thing infects the
population at large and we realize, hey, we just got
to manage the heck out of this, so we're gonna
implement buddy systems. You can never be alone or or
maybe it's like a only you have to be three
people together the same point, because there's that scene in
the in the prequel remake where like, doesn't it infect

(44:42):
two people at the same time by just like smushing
up against one person and then that was like the
big special effect from that movie where like two people
were merged together and kind of crawling around like a
scorpion on the floor. Yeah, they had to reverse engineer
the that weird corpse that they um. Well, maybe it
just means that that every day, like twice a day,
everybody at your work or in your home has to

(45:04):
do that blood do the blood test where you burn
their blood. Yeah, if only finding guinea worm larvae was
as easy as just burning your blood and making it
a jump up and attack you. All Right, Well, there
you have it. If you have thoughts about guinea worm
or the thing, right into us. We're get in touch

(45:26):
with us. We're always happy to talk about that, and hey,
If you want to learn more about the Carter Center's
efforts Carter Foundations efforts against guinea worm, head on over
to uh Carter Center dot org. UH they have a
pretty pretty awesome website. It's pretty easy to find well worth.
Any of their programs are ongoing. Yeah, and one other
quick plug I want to mention here on the show,

(45:47):
we are about to do one of our first live
events with Joe, Robert and myself. It's gonna be at
the upcoming convention in early September in New York City.
So if you're in the area and you're a Star
Trek and we are going to be at Star Trek
Mission New York, and we're gonna be talking about planetary
contamination while we're there. So if you want to meet us,

(46:09):
you want to come see the show live, or maybe
you've got friends who are just into planetary contamination and
are also Star Trek fans that are gonna be there.
Let them know that's where we're gonna be and we're
looking forward to It's gonna be a blast. Yeah, and
we may institute fiery blood tests, yeah, I think everybody.
I think that's how we'll kick it offs. Have everybody
do a blood test if they you have to use

(46:31):
like a hot wire, though you can't just use like
a lighter or something like that. Uh. The other way
to get in touch with this, of course, after you've
gone to the website, after you've gone to the social
media is you can always write us the old fashioned
way at blow the mind at how stuff works dot com.

(46:56):
Well more on this than pathands of other topics. Because
how stuff Works dot Com I think the Big Four
start proper part far f