GROSS! This was in his brain for four years!

In what has to be one of the most bizarre cases in recent medical history, a series of brain scans have been made which charts the path of a tiny parasitic tapeworm as it burrows its way through the brain of a British man.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - This is the first case of its kind in Britain, the worm that is less than 0.3 inches long burrows from the right side of the man's brain, to his left in the span of four years.

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The parasite is known as Spirometra erinaceieuropaei, and originates in the Far East. It is an extremely rare specimen, and only 300 cases have been recorded around the world since 1953.

This tiny worm can cause inflammation in the body's sparganosis tissue which can trigger seizures, memory loss and severe headaches.

Very little is known about the rare parasite. It is thought that people become infected by it by consuming tiny infected crustaceans in lakes, eating raw meat from reptiles and amphibians or using a traditional Chinese remedy which includes raw frog.

The worm was the more benign of two subspecies, but had it been the more aggressive type, it would have laid eggs which would hatch and the offspring would have fed off the poor man's brain as they grew.

"We did not expect to see an infection of this kind in the U.K., but global travel means that unfamiliar parasites do sometimes appear," said Dr. Effrossyni Gkrania-Klotsas from Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge.

"We can now diagnose sparganosis using MRI scans, but this does not give us the information we need to identify the exact tapeworm species and its vulnerabilities."

"Our work shows that, even with only tiny amounts of DNA from clinical samples, we can find out all we need to identify and characterize the parasite," she continued.

"This emphasizes just how important a global database of work genomes is to allow us to identify the parasite and determine the best course of treatment."

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