A friend recently asked me this...It is an interesting question and I’m not sure every reader wants to know all the details, so skip over if you're grossed out by this kind of thing…but we've done a bit of research recently...and I won't say anything more about what we saw, where we saw it and why it prompted this research.
Suffice it to say that 100s of millions of people in the world live with and see few or no symptoms of round worm (just one example of what Oaxacans probably host in their digestive tracts). We assume, since we’ve lived sort of like the locals that we do have a variety of freakish microscopic and/or not so microscopic creatures living in us. We’ve eaten meat cooked in a street taqueria (except Abby who is a vegetarian)…we take showers without keeping our mouths taped shut. Moreover, we’ve had various digestive issues move through us (so to speak). Gabe threw up once. The rest of us, just the runs here and there…but overall we’ve been healthy and happy and maybe our intestines are perfect, clear of all alien life forms...but maybe not.
The adults in the family are thinner and the kids could use to be fattened up as well. We'll frequent the Cheese Board when we return to Berkeley and buy the bread we've been pining for all these months...The Bread Garden's sour dough loaf.
But back to worms. Our theory on the matter is this: we will go in for physicals when we return home and do the big kill there. Why bomb the creatures now when they’ll probably move back into the neighborhood, but with more friends and possibly more sinister ones at that?
I call this approach…Don't worry, be happy you're not having to count Weight Watcher points!
But back to worms. Our theory on the matter is this: we will go in for physicals when we return home and do the big kill there. Why bomb the creatures now when they’ll probably move back into the neighborhood, but with more friends and possibly more sinister ones at that?
I call this approach…Don't worry, be happy you're not having to count Weight Watcher points!
2 comments:
I grew up in a different developing country and every few years when we'd come back to the US, we'd get a lab check up to find out what parasites and bugs lived inside of us. We went to a hospital in Chicago which had some kind of tropical disease specialty. The most memorable part of those visits was a placque on the wall which listed the record for largest number of different worms and parasites found in an American family of four, after returning from living in a developing country--the number was greatrer than 100! (I don't remember the exact number, since it was more than 30 years ago).
And see what a wonderful and healthy person you are, Phil...a few parasites here and there, no problem, though I will be a little freaked out if our number is over a 100.
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