A timely letter was published in the Emerging Infectious Diseases journal shortly after my article on Baylisascaris procyonis was posted two weeks ago. It describes a quite unusual case of the infection in a recently deceased elderly woman that had lived in British Columbia, Canada. I wanted to write a quick note about this because it changes the dimensions of our understanding of this parasitic infection, challenging the notion of this disease as typically only afflicting infants and toddlers. Additionally, this letter nicely demonstrates how essential autopsies are to the ongoing pursuit of medical knowledge.
The patient was a 73-year-old woman who had suffered from Alzheimer-induced dementia for nearly a decade. She had spent most of her life living in a rural region of British Columbia and, towards the end of her life, as a resident in a nursing home. An autopsy indicated that the cause of her recent death was cardiopulmonary arrest due a large pulmonary embolus or, in layman's terms, a blood clot.
