Brain worms invade on S.F. couple’s aloha idyll
A brain-invading parasite infected Eliza Lape and her husband on their impromptu Hawaii honeymoon, but she still calls the trip “two weeks in paradise.”
The San Francisco couple took a trip to Maui in January and spontaneously eloped during the middle of their house exchange in Hana, Lape said.
They also contracted rat lungworm disease, an illness in which larvae passed to snails through rodent feces migrate to a host human’s brains or lungs.
“I felt initially like I wanted to crawl out of my body — stabbing pains in different parts of my body that would move,” Lape, now nearly recovered from the infection, said Tuesday. “Ben, my husband — his first symptoms were also this feeling of restlessness. He got terrible pain in his shoulders and elbows.”
The newlyweds, who got married Jan. 10, contracted the disease amid an uptick of cases in Maui.
“Over the last three months, the Hawaii State Department of Health has been investigating a cluster of rat lungworm cases on Maui Island,” said spokeswoman Janice Okubo. This year, six cases have been confirmed on Maui, and three on the Big Island of Hawaii, she added in an email.
Lape’s husband, Ben Manilla, a Peabody Award-winning professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, contracted a harsher form of the disease, she said.
Although Lape, 57, will return to her communications consulting job next week, her 64-year-old husband will continue physical therapy for help walking and using his hands, she said.
“They miss him terribly,” Lape said of Manilla’s students. “And he misses them. He really misses work.”
When they first returned from vacation on Jan. 16, they both went back to work, assuming they had a bad flu. But soon, Lape said, Manilla found he couldn’t use his pen to write on the whiteboard during his classes.
A week and a half after their return, an infectious disease specialist at UCSF diagnosed them, she said. The disease generally resolves itself, with no real cure apart from waiting for the worms to die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But complications stemming from the disease can be deadly.
Manilla was hospitalized in February, with a month in intensive care, and operations, bouts of pneumonia, kidney problems and a blood clot, Lape said.
The disease is generally contracted through eating raw or undercooked snails or slugs or contaminated vegetables in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Basin.
The couple do not know how they contracted the disease, Lape said, noting the abundance of fresh fruit stands they shopped at on the island.
“In the U.S., we often think we’re impervious to these kinds of things,” Lape said. “Who could think you could end up eating a vegetable or eating a piece of slug and end up with worms on your brain?”