A parasite called rat lungworm may lurk in backyards across the U.S.
Rat lungworm is a nematode whose scientific name is Angiostrongylus cantonensis. It has a stomach-churning life cycle that starts in rats.
“Their normal route in the rat is that they are ingested, they penetrate the intestine and they make their way to the brain, where they develop,” said Heather Stockdale Walden, a parasitologist at the University of Florida who has studied the worm.
“They come back to the pulmonary artery in the rat and they reproduce.” Rats excrete it and it can get picked up by snails and slugs, some of which are very tiny. The CDC explains its life cycle
in a video.
“In humans or horse or dog or bird it’ll still penetrate the intestine and it’ll enter the circulation and go to the brain and that’s where it stops. It doesn’t finish its development into the worm,” Walden said in a telephone interview.