13 - Trichinosis and Trichinella spp. (all eight of them, or is it nine?)

Summary

Like a hog, or a dog in the manger, he doth only keep it because it shall do nobody else good, hurting himself and others.

Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton (1577–1640)

The first time I saw live Trichinella spiralis was when I traveled to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and began an NIH postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Professor John E. Larsh. It was there that I observed probably Jim Hendricks or Norm Weatherly cervically dislocate a mouse, then skin and gut it. I watched as they took a pair of heavy scissors, and cut the mouse into small pieces before dumping everything into a 500-ml Erlenmeyer flask, containing a foul-smelling concoction of hydrochloric acid and pepsin. The flask was placed on a hot plate equipped with a magnetic stirrer, and allowed to stand for a few hours. The flask was then removed and the contents were poured through several layers of cheesecloth before gently centrifuging it and pouring off everything except the pellet at the bottom. A Pasteur pipette was then placed into the pellet and a small amount was removed to a microscope slide to which was added a cover slip. When I gazed through the microscope, I was astonished. There were hundreds of live, first-stage larvae of T. spiralis. It was an amazing site, one that I have not forgotten. As a student, I had seen these larvae in in situ-tissue sections stained with hematoxylin and eosin.