Saturday, October 31, 2015

Answer to Case 370

Answer: Lots of Halloween goodies.

As Arthur notes, the Entamoeba ladies include Entamoeba histolytica and E. dispar. There are also E. moshkovskii and E. bangladeshi - all morphologically indistinguishable of course! The smaller Entamoeba was E. hartmanni.  

The cupcakes were amazing - all courtesy of our Clinical Microbiology fellow, Dr. Rachael Liesman. As Yasir and Florida Fan mention, the cupcake with the pretzel stick represents Dracunculus medinensis, the Guinea worm, being pulled from a wound and wrapped around a stick. The equally clever cupcake right above this is a wound full of maggots. Yum. (they were actually delicious cupcakes).


Thanks for all of the great comments.

3 comments:

Kate said...

Last year my son was fascinated by the story of the guinea worm eradication effort. So on his birthday, after talking about my time in the Peace Corps in West Africa, I passed out cupcakes with gummy worms to 24 squealing delighted first graders. For fun we just looked up to see if anyone in else in the world had ever made guinea worm cupcakes and I'm tickled to see that someone has -- and far grosser and more realistic than mine!

ParasiteGal said...

Hi Kate, I'm glad you like the cupcakes! We always have a lot of fun with our Halloween goodies. Bobbi

braddie granes said...

This exactly looks like a perfect Halloween theme. I am a little late, but I will try this recipe on coming Halloween this year. Thanks, Parasitegal.