The Nation - News from April 27, 1989

Doctors removing a young man’s appendix were surprised when they found the real cause of his pain--a 2-inch-long red worm he had eaten with his homemade sushi. Although worms have been a long-recognized hazard of eating raw fish, experts say most cases of worm infection occur when people prepare it at home. At restaurants, sushi chefs work to keep worms from reaching customers. In the latest case, described in today’s New England Journal of Medicine, doctors identified the culprit as a larval nematode known as eustrongylides.