Be Careful While Eating From a Roadside Open Food Stalls

These days, quite often you would have heard people talking about a word ‘Cyst”. Somebody had had a problem of epilepsy and the treating doctor had told him about a cyst in the brain. Quite often you would have heard your aquantenance complaining about pain in right upper side of abdomen and jaundice and it was found later that a cyst in his liver was the cause of it.Also you would have heard or seen your relative suffering from severe dry cough along with chest pain and coughing out blood. When on a doctor’s advice chest X-ray was done, a cyst was found in the lung. Sometimes you do not have any problem and when you get routine medical check-up for job placement or for going abroad, you will be surprised to see a large round white shadow of cyst in chest X-ray on one side or both sides. You would have also heard that so and so got operated for lung cyst removal and later on after some time, again a cyst was formed after surgery.In medical terms, a cyst in the body is called “Hydatid Cyst” that is actually an egg with a special worm inside surrounded by a protected covering. When this cyst reaches inside a human body, it starts enlarging in size gradually. For a cyst to reside in a human body, the most favourite organs is either lung or liver. This hydatid cyst is also found in other organs of human body such as brain, heart and muscles of hand or foot and sometimes even in the body bones. The worm that gives birth to cysts or eggs is only 5-millimetre-long and is called in medical terms as Echinococcus Granulosus. You will be surprised to know this worm prefers living only in the intestine of a dog instead of living in a human body and the total life span of this worm is only between 5 months to approximately 2 years. Within this short span of life, this worm would have spread lakhs of eggs to earth soil, through excreta (shit) of a dog in whose intestine it resides.In our country, there is abundance of filth, dirt and a network of open drains. A lot of garbage, shit and urine,How does this cyst reaches lung?After reaching the intestine, worm inside the cyst breaks out the covering and roam freely. It then punctures the wall of the intestine and enters the adjacent blood pipes and then blood circulation. It then through these blood pipes reaches various parts of the body especially liver and lung where it makes its permanent abode. After settling down in any of these favourite places, it stars growing in size and construct for itself an outer covering for safety and gives birth to hydatid cyst which gradually start increasing in size. When cyst attains adequate size, the worm feels safe inside the cyst and the start giving birth to new worms who repeat the same process to become cysts and are now called daughter cysts whose number slowly increases.