If more are found, then there may be reason to worry. Fajardo is a pathologist at Stanford and chief of pathology at the Department of Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. The parasite appears to have been more aggressive than tapeworms or other common parasites. Tapeworms usually remain in the intestine, eating digested food and ignoring surrounding organs. This parasite, however, spread from the intestines in a large, tumor-like mass.
Doctors are unsure whether that mass was a tangle of large tubes or a group of smaller organisms.
The patient, identified only as an accountant, was admitted to Kaiser in March 1994. Already diagnosed with AIDS, he suffered from back and abdominal pain, weight loss, night sweats and fevers. He died after nine weeks in the hospital. An account of the parasite is published in Thursday's issue of the British medical journal Lancet. The main authors are Fajardo, Dr. Monica Santamaria-Fries of Kaiser and Dr. David Relman, a Stanford assistant professor of medicine.