My roommate Aubrey and I enjoy (“enjoy”) picking diseases we’d suffer from, if we had to. We also like to list diseases we’d rather die from than get treatment for (usually because the treatments are awful), and diseases we’d never ever want to get.
This is a variation on the old game of “Gun To Your Head” or “CHOOSE!,” which is Grace’s succinct summary of the rules.
So, if I had to have a worm infection, I’d pick Taenia saginata, the beef tapeworm.
Why? It causes loss of appetite or an early feeling of fullness — hello, weight loss! It sucks out nutrients, so you have to eat more just to stay nourished. It stays only in the GI tract, and does not invade other tissues the way Taenia solium, the pork tapeworm, does (this is called cysticercosis). The pork tapeworm can invade your brain and cause seizures, and eventually kills.
The beef tapeworm is like a real version of the Food Wormhole or Hollow Leg we have so fondly wished for when faced with a mountain of delicious food and limited gastric capacity. The beef tapeworm is the organic, all-natural answer to Alli or laxatives or whatever gross things people medicate themselves with to lose weight.
And finally, you can’t get the beef tapeworm unless you eat beef, so this means an exponential increase in steaks and burgers for dinner!
