For four months, a 52-year-old woman in the Philippines lived with headaches and visual hallucinations that came and went. Over the following weeks, her speech began to break down. She spoke fluently, but she often used the wrong words or made little sense, and she had trouble naming objects, repeating words, and following simple commands.
Brain scans revealed why. Cysts were scattered through several lobes of her brain and her cerebellum, and many contained a tiny bright dot. That dot was the head of a developing pork tapeworm larva.
