Spirometra erinaceous egg

Rudolphi, 1819

Spirometra erinaceieuropaei, a representative of the tapeworms (Cestoda) from the family Diphyllobothriidae in the genus Spirometra, is mainly distributed in the Mediterranean area and in East Asia. The worm is up to 75 cm long and 8 mm wide. The sexually mature tapeworm members are elongated with simple genital pores on the underside.

Spirometra erinaceieuropaei colonizes the small intestine of predators. The first intermediate host is the copepods in which the procercoid is formed. Frogs, birds and snakes act as the second intermediate host. In them the plerocercoid is formed.

The infection chain to the intestines of the final hosts (predators) can include transport hosts such as humans, pigs and hedgehogs. In these "false hosts" the infectious second larval stage develops as "sparganum", clinically as a less symptomatic mass in the subcutis (usually misdiagnosed as lipoma), the muscles(sparganosis) or in the brain. The exact biological allocation of the sparganum can be done by multiplex PCR (Jeon HK et al. 2018).

1. Jeon HK et al (2018) Differential Diagnosis of Human Sparganosis Using Multiplex PCR. Korean J Parasitol 56):295-300.
2. Prasetyo RH et al. (2019) Sparganum in frog meat: A warning for the occurrence of human sparganosis. Trop Parasitol 9:130-131.
3. Tang TH et al. (2017) Molecular identification of Spirometra erinaceieuropaei tapeworm in cases of human sparganosis, Hong Kong. Emerg Infect Dis 23:665-668.