Wily as a fox

The fox tapeworm can cause severe liver damage. A team led by Professor Beat Müllhaupt wants to run a study to lay the foundation for better understanding and treating this rare disease.

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Markus Schmid* had no idea where he could have picked up the fox tapeworm, although he had an inkling that it was many years ago when he used to go jogging in the woods and ate a few wild strawberries along the way. He turned up at University Hospital Zurich (USZ) with stomach pain. After ultrasound, computer tomography, and a blood test the diagnosis was clear: alveolar echinococcosis.

Every year around 35 people in Switzerland contract this serious liver condition. It’s triggered by a small tapeworm that lives in the intestines of foxes and some dogs. The worm’s eggs find their way into the environment with the animals’ feces, for example on berries and vegetables. People who eat these can become infected.

If this happens, the larvae of the tapeworm find their way via the blood into the liver, where they form tumor-like cysts. It often takes five to twenty years before the disease is detected. Treatment takes the form of surgery to remove the cysts followed by a two-year course of medication. But for some patients an operation isn’t possible. So far, these people have had to take medication for the rest of their lives.

This is a situation the team around Professor Beat Müllhaupt at the USZ Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology intends to improve. Thanks to a gift from a grateful patient to the clinic, the researchers are now able to launch a study on alveolar echinococcosis. The goal is to capture all previous and future patients, including details of their symptoms and treatment, in a database. The project includes setting up a biobank of tissue samples.

This will enable the team to address unanswered questions on what is so far a little-researched disease: What genetic factors help decide whether a person gets the disease or not? What treatment promises to yield the best results? Above all, the researchers want to find out in what cases lifelong medication can be dispensed with. Their findings will help provide even better treatment to patients like Markus Schmid in the future. He was able to have surgery, and recovered after the subsequent course of drugs.

*anonymized/symbolic image

100% financed

Clinic for Visceral and Transplantation Surgery, USZ
Department of Nuclear Medicine, USZ
Institute of Pathology and Molecular Pathology, USZ
Institute of Parasitology, University of Zurich