Human Sparganosis in the United States

The first case of naturally acquired sparganosis is reported for New York The patient, a 43-year-old white male, had noticed a migrating, itching subcutaneous nodule for 5 years prior to excision of the worm. Although he had been in Africa and Italy during World War II, the time of first appearance of the nodule strongly suggests that the parasite was acquired locally. In recent years his only travels were in the Buffalo area of New York and Canada, and his habit of drinking water from natural streams while on hunting trips could have led to the infection. A table is given showing all cases known to date for the U. S. A number of these have not been previously published. Although Stiles reported the first case of sparganosis in the U. S. (Florida) in 1908, and Moore published a case in Texas in 1914, 38 years elapsed before the next case was put on record by Read (Texas) in 1952. In the meantime Mueller in a series of papers (1935 to 1941) reported that the parasite occurred in its animal hosts in central New York and throughout a large area of the eastern U. S., and in a much quoted statement Mueller and Coulston (1941) remarked that human sparganosis must occur over a wide area of the eastern United States throughout the range of the adult worm, since conditions for its transmission existed there, and that other cases would be found when physicians throughout this region become educated to look for the worm. Read's 1952 finding was the first of a number of new published and unpublished cases from the southeastern U. S. In the unpublished category a number from the same general region are known to the senior author from personal communication (Table I). The case farthest north of this series was one reported by Wirth and Farrow in July 1961, from Virginia. In a talk given before a meeting of the Empire State Association of Medical Technologists on 21 October 1961 and published several months later in the winter number of their journal (Mueller, 1961), the senior author stated: I still wait for the first published case of a natural human infection acquired in New York State. This remark got into the record just in time, because barely a month later the following case came to light. The case extends the range of this infection in man in the U. S. northward by some 450 miles.