It’s a rare disease that can be contracted from eating raw vegetables.
Rat lungworm can wreak havoc on a person’s body, and in some cases even cause death.
Graham McCumber’s steps are measured.
"To be able to walk as good as I can now, it took like three years," he says.
You see Graham is a rat lungworm disease survivor.
"It made it hard for me to walk, well I was in a coma for three months. So, my muscles all atrophied. I had to relearn how to do pretty much everything," he says.
Three years to go from a coma to walking, it was a chore taking all those steps to get back to where he is today.
"As a mom, seeing somebody who had been a surfer, skateboarder, healthy, completely devastated where he could not get himself from the floor onto a couch, much less walk," says Kay Hoew, Graham’s mother.
As for how the Big Island resident got the disease -
"I got a parasite from eating vegetables, maybe uncleaned properly," Graham says.
Once the parasite is in the body it attacks the central nervous system. Graham’s mom says they had to go outside the mainstream of western medicine to find different help for Graham.
"We’ve seen them work. And when I look at people who have not used them and have just gone with the prescribed medication, which are mostly pain relievers, a lot of them morphine based. We’ve got a different situation here," Howe says.
Graham and his mom are sharing that message at a two day conference where researchers are formulating plans on how to find out more about the disease and prevent it from spreading.
"What we would tell people to do is obviously if the main pathway of getting infected is by accidentally eating a snail or slug in produce, make sure produce is clean," said Robert Cowie of the University of Hawaii.
See the original article at: KHON2 Local News
