Unclean

Oh, EWW.

I was watching Medical Mysteries (or ER Mysteries,
something or other) on TLC. Today's started off with
this Orthodox Jewish guy who suddenly started having
grand mal seizures.

The doctors theorized that he had a tapeworm in his
BRAIN (tapeworm GROSS no matter where, but OMG
BRAIN!!) due to bad or improperly cooked pork. But the
kid and his family were all like hell no, we're
Orthodox we don't eat pork.

The mystery goes on...

More and more people in this Orthodox community wind
up showing positive for tapeworm (although no one else
was symptomatic to the degree this guy was) and the
CDC can't figure out WTF is happening until they hit
on something. Many of these Orthodox families employ
housekeepers. Housekeepers that are from third world
countries where tapeworm infestations are still
endemic (often through bad food handling for pork.
Pigs will eat fecal matter...I think I'm going to curb
my pork intake after seeing this...). In particular,
the first family mentioned had had a housekeeper from
Guatemala, but now they had another Latin American.

CDC tests the housekeeper. BINGO. She's got it, as do
many of the other housekeepers (they got over 1800
blood samples from the community).

The nasty? The CDC theorizes that it's these
housekeepers who are acting as disease hosts and that
they are transmitting the tapeworms through the
fecal-oral method. I.E. THEY'RE SHITTING (and the
tapeworm eggs get dispersed in feces) NOT PROPERLY
WASHING THEIR HANDS, AND THEN PREPARING FOOD FOR THEIR
EMPLOYERS! Food which goes on to infect the Orthodox.

OH. GAG. ME.

And this all makes me think of this woman at work who
is annoying on many levels, but she also NEVER WASHES
HER HANDS! I've seen her in the bathroom on several
occasions where she just leaves the stall and goes out
the door without even looking at the sink!! She's not
Latin American (I think she may be from Spain,
actually). Believe you me, we do not refer to this
woman very flatteringly in our office because of her
uncleanliness.