SAN FRANCISCO—A brain-invading parasite infected Eliza Lape, 57, and her husband , Ben Manilla, 64, while on their Hawaiian honeymoon, KGBM first reported. The San Francisco couple took a trip to Maui in January and eloped during the middle of their house exchange on January 10. They couple contracted rat lungworm disease, an illness where larvae that is passed through snails by rodent feces migrate to a host human’s brains or lungs.
The Hawaii State Department of Health has reportedly been investigating a cluster of rat lungworm cases on the island of Maui for the past three months. Six cases have been reported and confirmed on Maui, and three on the big island of Hawaii in 2017.
Manilla, a Peabody Award-winning professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, contracted a more severe form of the disease. Lape will be able to return to her communications consulting job within another week, while her husband will continue physical therapy to get assistance with walking and using his hands.
When the couple returned from vacation on January 16, they both returned assuming they suffered from the flu. Manilla reported that he was having difficulty using his pen to write on the whiteboard during his classes.
An infectious disease specialist at UCSF diagnosed the couple with the disease, that generally resolves itself, with no real cure apart from waiting for the worms to die, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Possible complications stemming from the disease can be deadly. Manilla was hospitalized in February, with a month in intensive care, and encountered pneumonia, kidney problems and a blood clot while hospitalized.
The disease is generally contracted through eating raw or undercooked snails or slugs or contaminated vegetables from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Basin. The couple remains unsure exactly how they contracted the brain-invading parasite.
